The start of the year is when most businesses review budgets and targets — and rarely the contracts underpinning both. This issue looks at why that's worth changing, plus what's moving on the regulatory front.
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act, 2023) rules are progressing toward operationalisation, and businesses handling customer or employee personal data should treat 2025 as the year to have SaaS vendor contracts and internal data-handling policies actually reviewed, not just acknowledged.
Force Majeure Clauses After COVID: What Indian Courts Actually Enforce in 2025 →
If your standard vendor or supply agreement hasn't been touched since before 2020, its force majeure language is very likely relying on generic terms courts are now reading strictly. A five-minute audit against the four elements covered in this piece is worth doing this quarter.
Set a recurring 15-minute calendar block, once a quarter, to skim the three contracts that matter most to your business continuity — not renegotiate them, just check nothing has quietly become outdated.
Q: We're a 12-person startup — do we really need a formal contract review process?
Not a heavy process, no — but an informal one is still worth having. The businesses that get caught out aren't usually the ones with no process at all; they're the ones who assume someone is keeping track when nobody actually is. A single shared document listing your key contracts, renewal dates, and one owner per contract solves most of the risk at almost no cost.
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