It’s Thursday at 11 AM.
A happy email from a happy agency in our inbox says (I paraphrase):
“ Hi! We’ve just closed a deal for a new retainer client, and our first project with them is a bit of a rush. We need to get started with them right away – the kickoff call is Monday. Can you take a look at their [30 page] contract, from procurement, and let us know if there are any issues?” We need to get it back to them by EOW….”
Congratulations! But also – end of week? As in tomorrow?
Yes. Tomorrow.
Oh.
We get it. It’s been a long business development cycle with this brand, they need your help yesterday, and the agency needs to close the deal and get the retainer flowing right away.
There’s a natural tension between the hurry up and wait that is agency new business – especially now when deals are slower to close and brands are skittish about cost, while simultaneously needing your help more than ever.
The last thing legal wants to do is be your speed bump in the way of getting a fair contract in place. We’ll do it if we have to when your agency’s wellbeing is at stake, but trust that we won’t enjoy it any more than you will.
And so in the spirit of “help us help you,” here are five ways your agency can get its next client contract to signed faster, safely.
Know Your Benchmarks in Advance
Do you know what your agency performance benchmarks and legal non-negotiables are? Does your negotiating team know them? And are they documented?
The primary benefit of having your own agency MSA, updated regularly, is that your agency’s benchmarks are already baked into it – things like payment terms, termination conditions, legal responsibility, insurance limits, and other terms that you’ve thought through and decided are important to your business.
Even when the parties are going to use the client’s contract documents – which we acknowledge is the case frequently, especially with an enterprise brand – having your own agreement serves as a checklist of the terms that matter to your agency and that you’ve probably reviewed with legal counsel.
If your agency doesn’t have an MSA that it feels confident about, creating a benchmark checklist that your team (or your legal advisor) can use to quickly cross-check a client provided agreement speeds things up immensely by helping you prioritize the issues that still need to be resolved or negotiated before a contract gets signed.
Get Your Agreement to the Client First
Avoiding the “battle of the forms” can be, well, half the battle to speeding up the contract stage of new client onboarding.
Why does it matter?
First, just because a client usually defaults to its own contract documents doesn’t mean they won’t sign your agreement. Sometimes, you just have not asked. Sometimes, the scope of work falls under a threshold that gives your marketing counterparts at the client discretion to sign your agreement without having to engage their procurement and legal teams.
Next, like we’ve just discussed above, your agreement already has your benchmarks baked in. It sets the table for closing the contract by focusing the parties on the few issues that may actually require discussion or negotiation. It eliminates the need to review terms and conditions that many times aren’t applicable to your work scope.
Finally, leading with your agreement positions your agency as the strong, sophisticated negotiator you already know it to be. I’ve found that it narrows the issues to debate, and the amount of time it takes lawyers and procurement teams to debate them.
If You Can’t Lead With The Agency’s Agreement, Get the Client’s Agreement ASAP
This admittedly sounds like a less than groundbreaking suggestion. I mention it because years of negotiating agency-client agreements has taught me that the contract is usually
the large anchor that everyone on the party boat ignored or forgot about until the boat’s engines are revving and you’re ready to leave the dock, while the anchor is still tied up.
If you know you’re going to sign the client’s paperwork, ask for their MSA or term sheet as early as you can diplomatically do so.
Some brands make this an easier part of the procurement or onboarding process than others. Some might even include the pro forma agreement in their RFP or during the pitch review process so that the parties know early on if there are any potential dealbreakers.
Getting the proposed agreement in hand early so that you can evaluate potential financial or legal red flags saves time and legal fees. (And a side tip: having the proposed work scope sketched out before the contract gets reviewed also saves time – if a proposed contract term isn’t relevant because it relates to a service or responsibility that your agency won’t perform, knowing this early on is key for time saving).
Be Ready to Coach a Team Sport
You probably run your agency like an entrepreneurial company. Some centralization of decision-making, a lot of close conversations among team-members about an upcoming piece of work, and lots of other characteristics that keep things moving quickly. If you’re like most of our agency clients, very quickly.
It would surprise you how small an amount of time the people in your client organization who need to be involved in onboarding your agency actually talk to one another about your agency. This is probably fine with you until you need them all to sign off on your contract.
We’ve had to corral client marketing, procurement and legal representatives on calls or in rooms a number of times to get a contract across the finish line. Most of the time when we had to do it, it was obvious that none of them had spoken to the other about the details of the engagement before the meeting happened. This meant time wasters including the following happened: contract points that legal were hard lining were not relevant to the actual work scope, or procurement didn’t understand that the agency wasn’t handling data and therefore that cyber insurance wasn’t needed, or nobody knew marketing was willing to back away from an exclusivity clause.
Seriously.
Do yourself a favor and ask, early, who on the client side will need to sign off on your agreements. Get names and roles if you can. Make mutual introductions to your team and theirs. Really, everything you can do to start the conversation as early as possible.
Your marketing counterparts may not love you pushing this point since they’d like to control the discussion on their side of things – that sometimes changes when they realize it’s faster to treat it like a team sport. And by all means, include them in the loop at all points during the conversation – they’re your strongest advocates in the client organization and the most motivated to get the agency to work as quickly as possible. Which leads us to Tip 5.
Get Your Legal Team in the Loop Early
The top reason most agencies say they wait to involve their legal advisors in getting a client agreement closed?
They don’t want to invest in legal fees for a deal until they’re sure it will happen.
There’s logic behind that rationale.
But the stories our experiences negotiating agency-client agreements tell us?
– Agencies underestimate the amount of time negotiating the agreement will take
– Agencies underestimate the high amount of leverage they have in the contract negotiation process, and that using that leverage will take time.
If your legal advisor is going to do a thorough job advising you, which I trust is the case, they are going to slow you down a lot less early-on in the contract review and negotiating process than they will if you loop them in at the last minute. They may also have fewer options for preserving upside in the deal for you if they are late to the party.
If you have serious reservations about investing in a full contract review by legal early in the dealmaking process, then at a minimum provide them with a summary and possible timeline of upcoming client deals, including whether you will use the agency’s contract forms or the client’s. This helps with creating bandwidth that the absence of which later can cause delays.
5 Tips and One Bottom Line
We’re strong believers at my Firm that legal foundation should be a profit builder for your agency’s business. Client contract negotiations are a key use case of this core belief brought to life daily for agencies.
*This article was authored by the Firm (100% human!) and originally published in the September 2, 2026 issue of The Next Big Win newsletter. You can subscribe to The Next Big Win Newsletter here.
