Legal and Commercial Bottlenecks

It's an uncomfortable truth: in many organisations, the legal and commercial functions — designed to protect the business — become the bottleneck that slows it down. Contracts stall. Approvals back up. Decisions that should take days take weeks. And the business starts routing around the very functions that are there to keep it safe.

How it happens

Legal and commercial bottlenecks rarely start with bad intent. They start with good people trying to do a thorough job in an environment where:

• There's no clear delegation of authority — so everything gets escalated
• Risk appetite hasn't been articulated — so every decision feels like it needs maximum caution
• Process has replaced judgment — people follow the process even when it doesn't make commercial sense
• The function is under-resourced — so work queues build up and priorities aren't clear

The symptoms

You might have a legal or commercial bottleneck if:

• Contract turnaround times are measured in months, not weeks
• The business regularly complains that "legal are blocking everything"
• Approval chains involve people who don't understand what they're approving
• Workarounds have emerged — teams finding ways to contract without going through the proper process

What to do about it

1. Diagnose the real problem

Is it a capacity issue, a process issue, a governance issue or a capability issue? They need different solutions. A capacity problem won't be fixed by better process design, and a governance problem won't be fixed by hiring more people.

2. Define decision rights

The single most effective intervention is usually clarity on who can decide what. A simple delegation of authority — with financial thresholds, risk categories and escalation triggers — can eliminate a huge volume of unnecessary approvals.

3. Separate legal advice from commercial decision-making

Legal advice identifies risk. Commercial leadership decides what to do with that risk in the real world — weighing opportunity, timing, relationships, governance and commercial value. When these two functions are conflated, everything feels like a legal issue — and everything slows down.

4. Design the process around the business, not the function

If your contract process was designed by legal for legal, it's probably not working for the business. Good commercial process design starts with the outcome the business needs, then builds the controls around it.

Taylor Commercial Intelligence helps organisations diagnose and fix commercial governance and process bottlenecks. Learn more about our Commercial Governance & Process Design service →