A few weeks ago, during a quiet moment between conference sessions, a fellow in-house counsel shared a story that’s been sitting with me ever since.
She was reviewing a contract for a fast-moving deal with a generative AI vendor. The business team was eager. The pricing was aligned. On paper, everything should have been simple.
Then came the clause about liability for model outputs.
The vendor insisted their language was “market standard.” Her team pushed back, but didn’t have solid data to support their concerns—just experience and instinct. The negotiation dragged. Momentum slowed. And while the deal eventually closed, it came at the cost of two weeks of back-and-forth, executive attention, and lost time her team didn’t really have.
“We weren’t trying to win the argument,” she told me. “We just needed something objective to stand on.”
That’s the problem so many legal teams are up against. It’s not that our positions aren’t valid—it’s that they often can’t be verified fast enough to matter.
Why Contract Benchmarking Matters
In-house counsel today are operating in a climate where unfamiliar terms—even reasonable ones—can trigger hesitation. And hesitation, more often than not, derails deals.
It’s not just the complexity of emerging technologies like AI that slows things down. It’s the absence of structure. Without a clear benchmark, even standard terms can feel like outliers. And once doubt creeps in, it becomes hard to dislodge.
Good Terms Need Benchmarking
At TermScout, we’ve reviewed thousands of real-world contracts. The gaps between perception and reality are striking.
We’ve seen clauses that appear in 60% of peer contracts labeled “non-standard.” We’ve seen boilerplate positions defended as common, when they barely appear in the wild. We’ve seen AI addenda stretched across multiple pages, not because of regulatory requirements, but because no one wants to be caught unprepared.
When legal terms are built on fear instead of data, they don’t speed up trust—they stall it.
But contract benchmarking reframes the conversation. It gives in-house teams the ability to move from defense to clarity—from “this feels right” to “this aligns with the market.”
Benchmarking Builds Confidence
It’s easy to assume slowdowns come from overly cautious lawyering or overly complex language. But most often, the problem is something simpler: the absence of shared understanding.
When a legal team can point to a clause and say, “This aligns with 83% of vendors in our sector thanks to contract benchmarking” the negotiation shifts. No one has to guess. Everyone can focus on trade-offs instead of trust gaps.
And that kind of clarity doesn’t just help legal—it helps the whole business move faster.
Be Ready with Contract Benchmarks
There was a time when contract benchmarking felt like a strategic extra—a polished detail to share with leadership or reference in retrospectives.
Now, it’s becoming core infrastructure.
Legal teams that benchmark aren’t just reacting to pushback. They’re anticipating it. They’re reducing the volume of low-value negotiations. They’re equipping their business counterparts with answers instead of escalations.
They’re not winning every argument—they’re avoiding the need for one in the first place.
A Better Question for the Next Stalled Deal
If your team is still navigating contracts based on precedent, preference, or the memory of what worked last time, you’re not alone. But in today’s environment, instinct isn’t enough.
When the pace of business outstrips the pace of proof, trust becomes a bottleneck.
So the next time a deal slows down—not because of the risk, but because of the uncertainty—pause before rewriting the clause. Ask something better:
Can you benchmark it?
Because if you can’t, you may not be able to trust it.
And if you can’t trust it, don’t expect the other side to. Contract benchmarking creates that trust.
