Ardent Partners has teamed up with Iasta, a Selectica Company, to offer a free webinar, Collaborative Contract Management: Procurement’s Role in Enhancing Compliance and Mitigating Risk, on Wednesday, Feb. 18 at 11 a.m. Eastern time.

This webinar looks at collaborative approaches chief procurement officers and their departments should consider for advancing contract management.

The webinar will cover:

• The shift in the criticality of contract management for procurement
• Best practices for improving collaboration in contract management
• Technology approaches for improving contract management collaboration
• Integrating contract management as part of supplier management

Register for the webinar.

The International Association for Contracts and Commercial Management (IACCM) is updating its largest benchmarking study to help participants learn where their organization stands, relative to others. Participants who complete the survey will get access to results 60 days prior to publication and are invited to a series of webinars to delve into the findings.

The benchmark study is divided into three surveys that examine companies’ Contract & Commercial Management Performance Measures, Primary Activities and Value Proposition.

Access part one: Performance Measurement directly here: www.iaccm.com/services/research/survey/?id=84

For part two, Primary Areas of Activity, and part three, Value Proposition, go to www.iaccm.com/research. This survey looks at headcount, contract complexity, measurements used to gauge both individual and functional performance and a range of efficiency indicators (e.g. cycle times, number of contracts per professional etc.).

“Benchmarking enables you to assess current performance and to make a business case for investment or improvement,” said an IACCM spokesman. “Increasingly, executives expect every function to have ready access to reliable external benchmarks and in the field of contract and commercial management, IACCM is the only reliable source.”

Participate in the survey through the links above.

The United Steelworkers union said Feb. 7 the strike by U.S. refinery workers is expanding to two more plants early on Sunday due to unfair labor practices by oil companies, reports Reuters.

Walk-outs at BP Plc’s Whiting, Indiana, refinery and the company’s joint-venture refinery with Husky Energy in Toledo, Ohio, shortly after 12 a.m. local time on Sunday would bring the number of plants with striking hourly workers to 11, including nine refineries accounting for 13 percent of U.S. refining capacity.

BP said on Friday it had received notice of the walk-outs at the two refineries, but the Steelworkers had said little about them until Saturday, the Reuters report added.

Read the story.

Compliancy Group will present a free webinar about the terms and conditions of business associate agreements that require your attention, and which ones you shouldn’t lose any sleep over.

The 90-minute webinar will be Thursday, Feb. 19, at 2 p.m. Eastern time

At some point, nearly all HIPAA covered entities and business associates must enter into business associate agreements (BAAs). Far too often though, entities commit one of two errors when doing so – they either sign a BAA “as is” without careful consideration of its terms or they negotiate each and every item in the agreement, Compliancy Group says on its website.

The first error may result in significant costs and liability, and the second wastes time and money. This webinar will address the terms and conditions of BAAs that require your attention, and which ones you shouldn’t lose worry about. The webinar will give both covered entities and business associates the tools they need to identify and address BAA risks, while protecting their business and saving time and money.

Register for the webinar.

Applying ordinary principles of contract law, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Sixth Circuit’s ruling that provisions in expired collective bargaining agreements created a right to lifetime contribution-free health care benefits for retirees, their surviving spouses, and their dependents, according to a paper posted by Wolters Kluwer Law & Business.

The court disapproved of the reasoning in the Sixth Circuit’s 2009 decision in International Union, United Auto, Aerospace, & Agricultural Implement Workers of Am. v. Yard-Man, Inc. (Yard-Man).

The report says that retirees brought a class action against the employer after it announced that they would be required to make health care contributions. The retirees contended that the promise of “full Company contribution towards the cost of [health care] benefits” in collective bargaining agreements provided them with a vested right to receive lifetime health care benefits in retirement without any contributions.

Read the report.

The fundamental legal structure of a well written financial contract follows a state-transition logic that can be formalized mathematically as a finite-state machine (a.k.a. finite-state automaton), write Mark D. Flood and Oliver R. Goodenough.

The automaton defines the states that a financial relationship can be in, such as “default,” “delinquency,” “performing,” etc., and it defines an alphabet of events that can trigger state transitions, such as “payment arrives,” “due date passes,” etc. The core of a contract thus describes the rules according to which different sequences of event arrivals trigger particular sequences of state transitions in the relationship between the counterparties.

Download the white paper.

Patrick Stakenas of Selectica and Lloyd Alexander of Seal presented a live webinar to hundreds of General Counsel, Procurement, HR, IT and Sales professionals, and that webinar is available now on-demand.

The webinar is aimed at contract management professionals involved in management strategy and processes.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is a proven and systematic approach for managing your contracts, Selectica says on its website. The company believes there are nine stages of contracts from contract request to renewal. The net-net of all this is to manage risks and revenue opportunities associated with many contracts in your enterprise.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

The United Steelworkers Union called for its refinery workers to stage their largest walkout in more 30 years Sunday, saying its negotiations with Shell Oil Co. broke down less than two weeks after they began, the Associated Press reports.

The union asked about 3,800 workers at nine refineries mostly in Texas and California to strike shortly after their previous contract expired after midnight.

The AP reports that the call for a strike happened after United Steelworkers, or USW, rejected Shell’s fourth contract offer. The union said Shell refused to provide a counter offer and that the company’s representatives had left the bargaining table.

Read the story.

Dan Harris, a founding member of Harris Moure, has posted a piece on “Above the Law” describing how a lawyer’s client should ensure a proper signing by its Chinese counterpart.

“You must ensure that your contract is properly executed by the Chinese company with which you are contracting,’ he writes. “It should be with a duly formed Chinese company and signed by the legal representative of that Chinese company. The name and address of the Chinese company should accord with the information registered for this company and the Chinese company’s chop should be used to seal the contract.”

Read the story.

Merrill DataSite is offering a complimentary report designed to help take the guesswork out of choosing a contract management system. This tool will help determine an organization’s precise contract management needs – from storage to reporting and security, Merrill reports.

In addition to understanding the core requirement categories for contract management solutions, you will also learn what questions to ask, including:

• What information do I frequently need to search for?
• What reports do people ask for on a regular basis?
• What data security concerns are unique to your industry?

Download the free report.

Silanis Technologies has posted online a free white paper on the benefits of a fully electronic contracting process, extending beyond a streamlined workflow.

Pressure to transact faster, more efficiently and from the convenience of mobile devices is accelerating the adoption of e-contracting, Silanis says on its website. “If you’ve ever had to sign a contract with an organization that is not using e-signature technology, you are familiar with the additional work that can easily consume 30 minutes per interaction – open an email, print a document, sign it, scan it into digital format, convert it to PDF, email it to the vendor and archive it. Keeping the process digital saves these time-consuming tasks.”

But the benefits of a fully electronic contracting process extend beyond a streamlined workflow, Silanis says.

Download the white paper.

Courts weighing whether union retirees have vested lifetime health-care benefits should apply ordinary contract principles, rather than special inferences or presumptions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, Bloomberg BNA reports.

The unanimous Jan. 26 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas is largely a win for employers, which may now have more freedom to alter, reduce or eliminate the health-care benefits they provide to retired union workers.

Bloomberg BNA says the court invalidated what has become known as the Yard-Man inference, a judicial inference applied by the retiree-friendly U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to find that retiree health-care benefits are vested for life in the absence of specific language to the contrary in a plan document or collective bargaining agreement.

Read the story.

Exari presents a free on-demand webinar discussing how document automation can alleviate the burden of creating HR documents.

The webinar also includes a demonstration of Exari’s Document Assembly and Contract Management products from an HR perspective.

Topics include how document automation can transform HR, if automation is right for your organization, and the most common types of HR documents to automate.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Corridor Company presents a free on-demand webinar aimed at anyone ready to issue a request for proposal, as well as those just starting the process.

Presenter Russ Edelman discusses RFP readiness (understanding product landscape as well as your own requirements and current practices), outreach strategies, down-select criteria, and the use of evaluation tools such as a functional comparison matrix, use cases, and implementation scenarios.

The webinar also answe4rs questions regarding the proper scope or timeframe for an RFP in the contract management space.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

Performance-based contracting received a boost this month when the Government Accountability Office found that the U.S. Department of Transportation is making progress in moving toward a national performance-based approach, reports Forbes.

In Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21^st Century (MAP-21), the DOT recognized the importance of a more progressive approach in the way federal agencies and states do business with each other, with planning organizations and with private vendors.

Accordinng to the Forbes report, in the fiscal year 2013, DOT provided about $50 billion to states and other “grantees” — such as metropolitan planning organizations and transit agencies — to support highway and transit infrastructure and safety.

Read the story.

The American Bar Association’s Section of Litigation has posted a free white paper about the concept of “meeting of the minds” during contract negotiations.

On its website, the ABA says this concept remains misunderstood by many. Surely, by its terms, it should mean that the two parties, in fact, thought the same thing and reached an agreement on the same thing. In what other way could two minds meet? But this illusory concept has never been the true requirement for contract formation, and attempts to import subjective understanding into contract law have largely been unsuccessful, the ABA says.

Read the white paper.

Ken Adams of the blog Adams on Contract Drafting has published online a question-and-answer exchange with the China Law Blog on the role that English-language contracts play in Chinese commercial life.

His Q&A exchange is with Steve Dickinson and Dan Harris.

The discussion covers such topics as: which language controls in a dual-language contract, how Chinese lawyers respond to English-language prose in contracts, whether Chinese lawyers draft contracts in English, contract provisions that make no sense in China, and other hot-button provisions.

Read the exchange.

Practical Law and Honigman Miller Schwartz & Cohn LLP present a free on-demand webinar focusing on common supply contract negotiating and drafting errors and challenges, steps to avoid disputes, and if a dispute arises, how to best position your client in the dispute resolution process.

On its website, Practical Law says its attendees can expect to discover when and why supply contracts should be used (or not used), how to win the battle of the forms, how to avoid issues that arise from the use of email in the process, and much more.

Free registration is required to see the recorded webinar.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

GovWin has published a free white paper on the top government contract set-asides for the current fiscal year.

The top ten federal set-aside opportunities for FY 2015 list consists of prime 100 percent set-aside contract opportunities from an array of federal departments and multiple industries, GovWin says on its website. The FY 2015 top ten set-aside opportunities total over $21 billion.

Jennifer Sakol, Principal Analyst with Deltek Federal Information Solutions, wrote the report.

Download the white paper.

Piliero Mazza has posted a free white paper analyzing the Small Business Administration’s proposed rule to implement provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 (NDAA) that change the way firms calculate compliance with the limitation on subcontracting rule on small business set-asides.

SBA’s proposed rule also proposes changes dealing with the nonmanufacturing rule, including affiliation and joint ventures, among other topics.

The memorandum summarizes the key provisions of the proposed rule. Comments are due to SBA on, or before, February 27, 2015.

Download the white paper.