Conferon’s Contracts process lifts off into cyberspace We have made several changes in our contracts process that have ushered the Contracts Department into the electronic age. We are now making changes to hotel contracts in the computer from disks obligingly provided by the hotels. For most contracts, the yellow highlighter that we formerly used to show changes manually has been replaced by software that automatically compares the original contract to the changed one, delineating the additions precisely and neatly in cosmic blue print. Deletions are shown with blue lines through the words. Doing contracts electronically greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to process contracts and gets them into the customer’s hand for final approval. The future holds the promise of a process that is electronic from start to finish, with contracts in every stage except the last (for signature) being transmitted by e-mail. We have updated our standard contract clauses, the Additional Conditions, by adding some new clauses and rewriting the old verbiage to reflect current industry conditions and to make them easier to interpret and calculate for all parties involved. We also reorganized these clauses and added category titles such as “Food and Beverage” to make it easier for all concerned to quickly locate and understand the clauses in each of the primary areas. With the goal of further expediting the contracts process, we are seeking preapproval of these Additional Conditions from major hotel chains by incorporating them into the body of the hotels’ master contracts, blending them into the hotels’ verbiage. Currently six major chain hotels are reviewing these contract drafts for such preapproval. When complete, these contracts will dramatically reduce the time spent in negotiations over the wording of clauses and help to speed up the contract process. We welcome any suggestions and opinions from clients or hoteliers on how we can improve the quality or speed of our contracts process. Please contact Robin Roth, Sr. Paralegal Editor or Kevin Lippert, Contracts Analyst, at 216.425.8333.