Ask any Account Executive what slows deals the most and you’ll hear one word: Legal.
Ask any in-house counsel the same question and you’ll get the mirror image: Sales.
Sales wants speed. Legal wants control. The result is a pipeline clogged with back-and-forth redlines, late-night review requests, and growing resentment on both sides.
But the conflict isn’t inevitable. It’s structural. And when sales and legal stop fighting, deals don’t just move faster — they close cleaner, with less risk.
Proposals are where sales urgency collides with legal caution.
Sales urgency: “We need to get this out today. The buyer is ready.”
Legal caution: “We can’t approve this until we review the terms in detail.”1
Both sides are right. Both are frustrated. And both are losing.
The costs pile up quickly. Delays leave proposals stuck in “legal review” for weeks, eroding buyer urgency. Errors slip through rushed approvals, creating overlooked risks or inconsistent terms. And frustration grows as sales sees legal as blockers while legal sees sales as reckless.
¹ Poor contract and proposal processes cost companies 9.2% of annual revenue due to delays, errors, and risks (Procurement Tactics, 2024). That’s not a minor inefficiency. It’s millions lost every year.
The fight isn’t about personalities. It’s about process design.
Reactive reviews pull legal in only at the last minute.
No shared visibility forces sales and legal to work in separate systems.
Duplicate effort has clauses re-reviewed across multiple deals.
Unclear rules leave no thresholds for which deals need legal sign-off.
The result: endless redlines, wasted hours, and slower revenue.
If you answer yes to two or more, you have a structural problem:
The teams that solve this problem don’t pick sides. They build systems that work for both.
Pre-approve standard clauses. Lock boilerplate terms for NDAs, MSAs, and proposals. Review once, reuse dozens of times, and eliminate duplicate reviews.
Automate approval triggers. Create thresholds so small deals bypass legal, while large or complex deals trigger review. Escalate only when parameters demand it.
Centralize visibility. Sales and legal work in one shared system, where everyone sees the same version of the proposal. Approvals, comments, and escalations are logged automatically.
Create exception paths. True red flags escalate to legal leadership, while routine deals flow through instantly. Legal protects the business without slowing every transaction.
² Gartner notes that AI-powered contract review is accelerating legal operations and improving efficiency across enterprises (AI-Powered Contract Review to Accelerate Legal Operations, 2024).
Old way (chaos). A rep pulls a deck from Google Drive and sends it to legal at 5 p.m. on Friday. Legal reviews from scratch in Word. Back-and-forth redlines eat two weeks.
New way (orchestrated). A rep answers 10 structured deal questions in CRM. The proposal builds automatically from approved templates. A deal crosses $500K → legal review auto-triggers. Legal sees context, comments, and proposed changes in one system. The proposal is approved in hours, not weeks.
When sales and legal stop fighting, everyone wins.
Sales wins speed. Deals move when buyer urgency is highest.
Legal wins control. Risk is managed consistently, not reactively.
Leadership wins visibility. Dashboards reveal where proposals stall and why.
Buyers win confidence. Faster, cleaner proposals inspire trust.
Here’s how to start bridging the divide this quarter:
Legal shouldn’t be a bottleneck. Sales shouldn’t be reckless. When both work together in a structured system, deals close faster, cleaner, and with less friction.
See how Talewind orchestrates cross-functional collaboration