Mansi Rana

An arbitration clause is a provision in a contract that requires the parties to resolve disputes arising from the contract through arbitration rather than through court litigation. It is one of the most commercially significant provisions in any commercial contract and one of the most frequently negotiated.

A wet ink signature is a handwritten signature applied directly to a physical document using a pen. The term comes from the literal ink that is wet immediately after signing. It distinguishes a traditional handwritten signature from digital or electronic signatures applied to documents in electronic form.

DPDPA compliance refers to an organisation’s adherence to the requirements of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, India’s first comprehensive data protection legislation. The Act governs the processing of digital personal data in India and establishes a framework of rights for individuals and obligations for organisations that process their data.

Force majeure is a contractual provision that excuses one or both parties from performing their contractual obligations when an extraordinary event beyond their control prevents or impedes performance. The term comes from French, meaning “superior force”, and refers to events that are so unusual and unforeseeable that they fall outside the normal risks that contracting parties are expected to bear.

A bilateral contract is a contract in which both parties make promises to each other. Each party is both a promisor and a promisee: one party promises to do something, and the other party promises to do something in return. The mutual exchange of promises is what gives a bilateral contract its name and what distinguishes it from a unilateral contract, where only one party makes a promise.

Common contract issues are the ones that appear repeatedly in the same forms, in the same clause types, across contracts of different types and sizes. They are common not because they are obvious but because they are easy to overlook under time pressure, because business teams accept language from counterparties without understanding the implications, and because legal review is sometimes performed without a systematic checklist.

CLM security evaluation is not completed by confirming that a vendor holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications. Most enterprise CLM vendors hold one or both. The certifications are a starting point, not a conclusion. What they tell you depends on what type of certification it is, what scope it covers, how old it is, whether it has any noted exceptions, and whether the scope actually covers the systems and data handling practices that are relevant to your use case.

Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, governs how electronic records, including digital contracts, are admitted as evidence in Indian courts. For enterprise legal teams managing large volumes of electronically executed agreements, understanding Section 65B is not an academic exercise. It is the difference between a digital contract that is enforceable in a dispute and one that cannot be admitted in evidence because the certification requirements were not met.

Contract amendments are a routine part of enterprise contract management. Business conditions change. Commercial terms need adjustment. Scope modifications arise from project developments. Regulatory requirements create new obligations that need to be incorporated into existing agreements. For a large enterprise managing hundreds of active contracts, amendments are a continuous workflow, not an occasional event.

Third-party risk management is the process of identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risks that arise from an organisation’s relationships with external parties: vendors, suppliers, service providers, technology partners, outsourced functions, and any other third party that has access to the organisation’s data, systems, operations, or customers.

Clause standardisation is the process of defining approved language for the key provisions in an organisation’s contracts, establishing fallback positions for negotiation, and building systems to ensure that deviations from those standards are identified, escalated, and documented. For enterprise legal teams managing high volumes of contracts across multiple business units, clause standardisation is the foundation on which contract governance is built.

Contract risk scoring is the systematic process of assigning a quantified risk level to a contract or contract clause based on predefined criteria. For enterprise compliance teams managing hundreds or thousands of active agreements, contract risk scoring turns the subjective judgment of “this contract looks risky” into a structured, consistent, and scalable process that can be applied across the full portfolio.