Zeidel & Associates Creates Efficient System that Supports National Hotel Brand Launch
Situation
Zeidel & Associates represents a premier private investment firm focused on global real estate, which currently holds approximately $80 billion of assets under management. The firm was in the process of developing a new hotel brand to manage properties it and unrelated third parties would own.
Challenge
The investment firm turned to us to help them design and implement much-needed efficient internal processes to handle the large volume of legal documents this new venture would generate. Two areas of focus involved the entering into and administering of vendor agreements, which are critical to the launch and ongoing management of any hotel. These agreements range from contracts for food and beverage management, to spa services, IT licensing, laundry, parking, security, etc. The sheer number of vendor contracts was overwhelming the in-house legal and finance teams, as well as the hotel staff.
Solution
The newly designed efficient process that Zeidel & Associates created started with drafting a form agreement that could be easily duplicated for a variety of vendors, with language that effectively protected both our client and third-party owners. We also instituted a checklist for contract review to be completed by appropriate client team members to create a workflow, with built-in accountability, to be followed before legal review would be triggered. Third, we developed a set of standard terms and conditions to be attached to vendor contracts that were not on our own form, to ensure certain critical legal protections. We also tracked repeat vendor relationships so negotiated templates could be reused rather than renegotiated each time. Lastly, we instituted a document management system to track the status of contracts, identify critical dates such as expiration and renewal, and maintain ready access to executed agreements.
Zeidel & Associates handled more than 350 contracts within this project, helping the brand successfully launch on both the east and west coasts.