Wesley Schnell

According to the post, fewer than 0.1% of contract disputes are formally litigated, yet negotiations still revolve around polishing sub-clauses as if a judge's reading of page ten were the likely outcome.

• Meanwhile, vendors add clauses to enterprise agreements and, once a deal is signed, tend to keep delivering according to their standard practices at scale, regardless of what the contract says.
• The practical recommendation: negotiate terms that give a party "negotiating ammo" — the contractual ability to be disruptive or inconvenient when something goes wrong — rather than terms that read best in theory.

The post cites a dispute between Broadcom and AT&T in which the judge said the matter was "screaming for a business solution"; the case settled outside court. It closes with a section labelled "Contract Hack" that restates the recommendation to focus on terms that create leverage.

The claim first appears as a bare assertion — "Leverage is the most important factor in every negotiation - NOT risk" — in a one-line post. A longer post on leverage then makes the case, with reasoning, a litigation example and a caveat about how vendors actually operate.

Read original · Original 2

They judge a pleasant counterpart who insists on rewriting contract sentences a worse prospect than a rude one, reasoning that constant rewriting signals control issues and a possible unwillingness to compromise.

• A counterpart without decision authority is workable because approval escalations can be managed while attention stays on the important issues.
• The post works through the ranking live, with Schnell changing position mid-argument as the trade-offs become clear.

Negotiator C is chosen first despite being called an "asshole", because an approaching vacation creates an incentive to compromise.

• Negotiator A — kind but obsessive about rewriting contract sentences — ranks worst.
• Schnell says they would work collaboratively with Negotiator D, conceding irrelevant language unlikely to cause problems in order to move the deal forward.

Read original · Original 2

The advice is to distinguish high-impact obstacles from noise.

• Chasing down a sender is worth complaining about; a Friday fire drill is inconvenient but rare enough to manage; and irrelevant legal points can be conceded to keep the business moving.
• Schnell also says sloppy or informal redlining from opposing counsel does not bother them, though they acknowledge it is a major pet peeve for many in the LinkedIn contracts community.

In a holiday-themed scenario, the chosen answer is the one about a work email missing necessary attachments — like opening a gift and finding the batteries missing — because analysing a deal quickly should not mean hunting for the full agreement.

• The other options, including a month of everyone agreeing to the standard form and a wish about redlining etiquette, are treated as less useful or less frequent.
• The post references Nada Alnajafi's guidance on contract redlining etiquette.

Read original · Original 2

Vendors are adding AI-specific clauses to enterprise agreements daily, and Schnell asks how those terms affect each business's actual operations after signing and whether they create future leverage if a dispute arises. The frame matches the broader contract argument: understand what changes real behaviour and keep terms that leave a party room to push back.

The post promotes an AI Legal Session advertised for Thursday 19 March at 11 AM. It is described as a walkthrough of the latest AI-related terms appearing in enterprise agreements and how legal, contracts and procurement teams can navigate those risks while negotiating future leverage.

Read original

The post quotes the outreach message it received to make the distinction concrete and sets the genuine article apart from the offers it says arrive regularly.

According to the post, three emails arrived in a single week offering a paid "featured" placement in a law magazine.

• It also refers to an earlier post exposing the practice.
• By contrast, the Photon Spotlight list of top in-house counsel at US technology companies came with a message from Amit Koshal of Photon Legal stating that there were no fees and the list was not open to applications.
• The post says the committee engaged over 432 US-based general counsels, recorded more than 67 podcast interviews and sent the profiles to a jury that selected the top thirty for Times Square billboard placement.

Read original

It answers two questions: What is the core claim, and what does it look like when argued out rather than asserted?

The argument: contract teams spend too much time polishing language for a courtroom outcome that almost never happens.

• Fewer than 0.1% of contract disputes are formally litigated, the post says.
• It points to a Broadcom and AT&T dispute where the judge described the matter as "screaming for a business solution" before it settled outside court.
• Vendors, in this account, add new AI clauses to enterprise agreements daily, but once a deal is signed, the contract often disappears into a virtual drawer while the vendor continues delivering at scale according to its standard practices, whatever the paper says.
• The recommendation is to optimize for real-world leverage rather than theoretical enforceability: the clause that matters is the one that gives a party the ability to be disruptive when something goes wrong.
• Short paragraphs, a quoted line from the bench, and a section labelled "Contract Hack" keep the post readable.
• It closes by promoting an AI legal session scheduled for Thursday 19 March.

For brands planning a campaign

For a contract negotiation training brief, this is the anchor piece. It offers a debatable thesis (leverage over language), a named dispute to test it against, and a ready-made exercise: ask participants which terms would give the buyer room to push back if delivery went wrong, rather than which terms read best.

Use it to see how the creator states the position in its barest form or to get a short line to quote.

The post makes a single assertion: leverage, not risk, is the most important factor in every negotiation.

• It gives no example or reasoning; the longer post makes the case.
• The rest is a joke about the creator's miniature schnauzer, Rockstar, and a note that no animals were harmed in the making of the post, implying a visual that does not appear in the post.

For brands planning a campaign

This works as an opening provocation for a workshop or a debate prompt, but it teaches nothing on its own. Pair it with the longer leverage post to give the session both the headline and the reasoning.

Read it for the judgment behind the advice, not just the advice itself.

The post answers a scenario question about four negotiators and ranks them.

• Negotiator C is picked first, even though the post calls him an "asshole", because an upcoming holiday creates an incentive to compromise.
• Negotiator B comes next, despite lacking authority, because approval escalations can be managed while attention stays on the key issues.
• Negotiator A, described as kind but obsessive about rewriting contract sentences, is judged the worst option because the behaviour signals control and an unwillingness to compromise.
• Negotiator D is the one the creator says they would work with collaboratively, conceding irrelevant language with a low chance of coming back to bite in order to move the deal forward.
• The text works through the reasoning live, with the creator changing position as the trade-offs become clear.

For brands planning a campaign

This is the most immediately usable piece for a training audience because it models counterpart assessment rather than clause review.

• A workshop can borrow the format: rank four negotiator profiles against a deal you actually need to close, then justify the order.
• To adapt it, create your own written profiles; the original descriptions are not in this post.

Read it to see which friction points are called annoying and which are waved away.

The post names D as its answer, then comments on the other options.

• A is called extremely helpful but lasting only a month.
• B is assessed in terms of how much time would be saved if opposing counsel followed Nada Alnajafi's contract redlining etiquette.
• On C, Friday fire drills, the reply is that they increase pressure but do not happen often enough to be a serious problem.
• On D, missing attachments behind a work email, the complaint is sharper: legal professionals are regularly asked for an opinion on a short contract excerpt without the full contract attached, and analysing a deal quickly should not mean chasing down the sender.
• The post also says sloppy or informal redlining from opposing counsel does not bother the creator, while acknowledging it is the biggest pet peeve for many in the LinkedIn contracts community.
• The piece is built around It's a Wonderful Life references.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for a training segment on intake and handoffs. It identifies a specific, quotable friction point—being asked for an opinion on an excerpt without the full contract—and distinguishes that problem from the redlining-format complaints that dominate much of the community discussion.

Read it to understand who is speaking before weighing the negotiation advice.

The post tells the story of being named to a list of top in-house counsel at US technology companies, presented as the Photon Spotlight with a Times Square billboard placement.

• It quotes the outreach message from Amit Koshal of Photon Legal, which says there were no fees and the list was not open to applications.
• According to the post, the committee engaged over 432 US-based general counsels and recorded more than 67 podcast interviews, then sent the profiles to a jury that selected the top thirty.
• The creator contrasts this with pay-for-play offers, saying three emails offering paid "featured" placements arrived in the previous week, and refers to an earlier post exposing that practice, which is not part of the material reviewed here.
• Career details mentioned include Stockton University, time at the White House, travel to more than 50 countries, years in-house at Oracle, and Harvard Law School Executive Education.
• The tone stays jokey, with a Charles Barkley impression and a joke about a hanging chad.

For brands planning a campaign

Context rather than training material.

• For a campaign seeking a speaker who can discuss credibility and evidence in negotiation, the contrast between a no-fee nomination and paid placements offers a talking point.
• Ask for independent verification before presenting the recognition as established.

Using a Broadcom and AT&T dispute as an example, the post says the judge called the matter "screaming for a business solution" and the case settled outside court. The takeaway: keep operating realities in mind and negotiate terms that give a party leverage when something goes wrong.

Reframes negotiation around real-world leverage rather than theoretical enforceability, using a recent litigation example to make the point concrete.

For brands planning a campaign

A B2B software company building negotiation training could use this as a core module on leverage: identifying terms that create practical options and avoiding over-optimizing clauses unlikely to shape vendor behavior.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Both demonstrate a teaching style built on realistic tradeoffs rather than abstract principles.

Uses multiple-choice and ranking prompts to get readers to commit to a position, then explains the reasoning behind the ranking.

These are LinkedIn engagement prompts, not validated assessments or research instruments.

For brands planning a campaign

The format lends itself to a workshop exercise, sales-training quiz, or negotiation assessment where participants defend priorities such as speed, leverage, and working relationships.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The advice is to separate high-impact issues from noise and keep the business moving.

Uses humor, pop-culture references, and recognizable office scenarios to make process problems easy to discuss.

On redlining, Wesley Schnell says sloppy redlining is not a personal pet peeve, though it is a major annoyance for many in the contracts community.

For brands planning a campaign

A training provider can use these examples to teach triage: which contract-process problems deserve escalation, which can be conceded, and how legal teams can reduce friction with business counterparts.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

It also promotes a session on AI-related terms in enterprise agreements for legal, contracts, and procurement teams.

Connects a current contract trend to the leverage-first framework used in other posts.

For brands planning a campaign

For a B2B software company, this is the clearest opening for an AI-contract workshop: how to read new AI terms, negotiate them alongside existing risk allocation, and train teams to distinguish language that matters from language unlikely to change vendor behavior.

Examples: Source 1

The post combines career milestones with a warning to legal professionals about vanity recognition.

Builds credibility through a personal career story, then turns to media literacy and skepticism about pay-to-play recognition.

The post recounts the nomination and selection process from the nominee's perspective. If a campaign relies on the award, ask for independent verification of the award and the committee's claims.

For brands planning a campaign

The post could support a session on professional credibility in legal tech or legal marketing, focusing on legal-industry recognition and misleading offers. If a campaign relies on the nomination or recognition, ask for documentation verifying the credentials.

Examples: Source 1

They state the program carried no fees and that Amit and the nomination committee were "genuine and sincere"; they were later included in the final Top 30 list and featured on a Times Square billboard. Schnell cites this as a recognition, not a paid placement, and contrasts it with pay-for-play magazine features.

Original disclosure

There are no fees; this is simply our way of giving back to the community.

View example

The post gives no dates for the role or says whether it continues; ask for the dates and current status.

View example

They give concrete examples, such as trading a liability cap for a longer term or a termination right for a higher price.

Carter lays out a repeatable trade-finding method and writes on behalf of an AI negotiation product. Schnell focuses on how vendors behave after signing, reading the counterpart across the table, and scenario-based reasoning rather than a product-led method.

Read original · Original 2

A named customer deal shows that a vendor's stated limit was not the real limit—the same lesson Schnell draws about leverage.

Etkin focuses on procurement operations and cost forecasting for AI usage. His posts read as vendor case studies and event promotion, while Schnell focuses on contract terms and negotiating leverage, teaching through hypothetical scenarios.

Read original · Original 2

A supplier-agreement case study backs up the approach.

Taylor concentrates on what happens after signature, such as compliance, audit, and recovery, and writes structured practice lists and a services-oriented case study. Schnell focuses on how the negotiation itself is conducted and on keeping leverage in the terms.

Read original · Original 2

Wesley Schnell's posts lay out a teachable method: start with deal points such as pricing, payment terms, contract term, termination for convenience and liability cap, then treat each as something to trade.

• A customer pushing for a higher liability cap might be asked to make a longer commitment; a request for monthly billing might be matched with monthly usage limits and overages; a demand for termination for convenience might prompt a price increase.
• The posts make the training case directly: most lawyers learn to redline through repetition and never learn to negotiate—the gap a contract-negotiation curriculum exists to close.
• Carter's framing of negotiation as discovering the intersection of mutual wants gives a workshop a clear spine and worksheets participants can complete on a live agreement.

The material also markets the writer's negotiation software, with posts closing on demo and AI-capability pitches.

• A workshop built from it would need to separate method from promotion.
• The published evidence is two posts, with no workshop format, delivery record, audience size or commercial terms; ask for a proposed session structure and delivery references.
• The scope stays within a single negotiation, narrower than a leverage framing that also covers escalation paths, intake quality and how new AI clauses change post-signature options.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Wesley Schnell's posts argue that buying AI behaves more like buying steel than buying software: token spend moves every day, pricing shifts every few months, a model can be deprecated before the contract ends, an engineering team can chew through an annual commit in three months, and when AI is built into a product, tokens land in cost of goods sold and show up in gross margin.

• They also offer a decision heuristic worth teaching: work out whether a vendor has genuinely hit its limit or the buyer has only hit the edge of what it can see.
• Pushing a maxed-out vendor burns goodwill, while failing to push one with room leaves money behind.
• The posts give a session an outcome to anchor on: a procurement team found an incremental 21% saving after a sales rep said there was no more room to move.

The posts are vendor-attributed case studies built around a customer quote and a product-linked saving; they assert the method behind the result more than they show it.

• They offer no negotiation framework comparable to deal points and trades, and no session format.
• Etkin also writes from the buying side of enterprise software deals, the opposite vantage point from the sales, legal and contracts teams a software vendor's workshop would usually convene.
• The material assumes finance and engineering are in the room for the price discussion.
• Ask for a proposed session format and evidence that it works for the intended audience.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Wesley Schnell's posts cover centralising a contract repository, extracting obligations at signature, monitoring performance against terms on a cadence, keeping a retrievable audit trail and naming one accountable owner per contract.

• They also describe a format that transfers into an exercise: thematic reviews that test every contract and invoice against a single question, such as rebates, payment terms or rate caps.
• This quickly surfaces patterns and makes the fix a process rather than a one-off invoice correction.
• A quantified case supports the exercise: a national retailer ran more than 900 supplier agreements through contract-to-invoice checking, found over half of suppliers paid earlier than the contract required, and unlocked $22M in working capital.
• That is stronger material than anything in the leverage framing for the moment after signing, when the paper is supposed to constrain behaviour.

Wesley Schnell's posts read as a compliance checklist followed by a vendor capability list, ending in an AI-plus-services pitch.

• A workshop would need to strip the sales frame from the substance.
• The posts offer no negotiation method, scenario or teaching sequence to adopt, so the software company would be buying subject matter for one module, not a workshop; it would still need a practitioner voice to teach the negotiation itself.
• Ask for delivery history, audience data and commercial terms before commissioning the module.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2