Operational Clarity for the Way Agreements Actually Work
Statutum was built on a simple observation: most in-house operations teams manage contracts through a mix of shared drives, email threads and spreadsheet trackers — not because they lack ambition, but because the path to something better is rarely straightforward.
Back to HomeHow Statutum Came to Be
Statutum started in 2019 when its founding team noticed a persistent gap in the Singapore market. Organisations were investing in contract management software without first addressing the underlying processes those tools were meant to serve. Implementations stalled, adoption lagged and teams reverted to familiar workarounds — not because the technology was wrong, but because the operational groundwork had not been laid.
The founding team — drawn from corporate operations, process design and enterprise software backgrounds — decided the more useful intervention was upstream of the software decision. If the workflow was clear, the storage conventions were agreed and the intake process was consistent, then selecting and implementing the right tool became a much simpler conversation.
Since then, Statutum has worked alongside operations teams at Singapore-based companies ranging from regional subsidiaries of global corporations to domestically-owned professional services firms. Each engagement has reinforced the same conviction: the work is fundamentally about people, process and communication before it is about technology.
We keep our practice deliberately compact. A small team means every engagement receives direct attention from experienced practitioners — not delegation to junior staff. We take on engagements where we are confident we can add measurable value, and we refer work outside our scope rather than stretch beyond what we do well.
Making Contract Operations a Manageable Discipline
Our mission is to help in-house teams develop contract operations capabilities that are proportionate, maintainable and genuinely embedded in daily working practice — not theoretical frameworks that sit on a shelf.
- Scope honesty. We define boundaries before starting. If something falls outside our remit, we say so and point towards the right resource.
- Process before tooling. We examine workflows before recommending software. A clear process implemented in a spreadsheet beats a confused process in an expensive platform.
- Deliverable focus. Every engagement ends with something the team can use — a written report, a process diagram, a runbook. Not a presentation deck.
- Independence. No software vendor affiliations, no referral arrangements. Our recommendations are shaped solely by what fits the client's context.
Who You Will Be Working With
Every Statutum engagement is led directly by a practitioner. There is no layers of account management between the brief and the work.
Jonathan Tan
Jonathan spent twelve years leading operations functions at Singapore-based regional businesses before founding Statutum. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the National University of Singapore and has led contract workflow redesigns across financial services, logistics and professional services sectors.
Priya Lakshmi
Priya brings a background in enterprise process design and CLM tool evaluation. Before joining Statutum she managed a multi-entity contract operations function for a Singapore-listed group. Her work focuses on intake design, approval routing and CLM software configuration for mid-sized teams.
Marcus Wong
Marcus specialises in the technical dimensions of contract repository work — storage architecture, naming conventions, version control and metadata structuring. He leads Repository Audit engagements and advises on integration between CLM platforms and document management systems commonly used across Southeast Asia.
How We Work
Every Statutum engagement follows a consistent set of operational and ethical standards — not because they are imposed from outside, but because they reflect how we believe consulting work should be done.
Written Scope Before Work Starts
Every engagement begins with a written scope document agreed by both parties. This defines deliverables, timeline, access requirements and what falls outside the project boundary.
Confidentiality as a Default
We treat all client information — agreements, workflows, team structures, commercial terms — as confidential regardless of whether a formal NDA is in place. Standard mutual confidentiality terms are included in every engagement letter.
Deliverable Sign-Off Process
All written outputs — audit reports, process diagrams, runbooks — go through an internal review before delivery. Clients receive a review draft with a defined comment period before the final version is issued.
Clear Scope Boundaries
We do not provide legal advice or substantive review of agreement content. Where engagements touch areas requiring qualified legal input, we flag this clearly and support clients in identifying appropriate referrals.
Stakeholder Engagement Protocols
Interviews and working sessions with client team members are scheduled with reasonable notice, kept to agreed durations and followed up with written notes shared within 24 hours.
Personal Data Handling
Where our work involves access to systems containing personal data, we operate in accordance with Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act and handle such access in the minimum necessary scope required for the engagement.
Contract Operations as an Organisational Discipline
When organisations grow, the informal arrangements that worked well at twenty people begin to create friction at two hundred. Agreements get renewed late, stored inconsistently, or circulated through processes that involve too many steps and too little visibility. The cost is rarely dramatic — it tends to accumulate quietly in missed renewal windows, duplicated drafting effort and slow approval cycles.
What we have observed across our engagements in Singapore is that the underlying cause is almost always the same: the process of managing agreements was never formally designed. It evolved from whatever happened to work at an earlier point in the organisation's growth. Addressing it requires both an honest assessment of the current state and a deliberate, sequenced approach to building something more durable.
The contract operations discipline sits at the intersection of operations management, information management and workflow design. It draws on knowledge of how agreements are structured and what they need to be accessible and retrievable over time, combined with an understanding of how approval workflows are best designed for organisations of different shapes and governance models.
Statutum's work in Singapore reflects the specific context of a market where many organisations manage contracts across multiple entities and jurisdictions, often in more than one language. This adds dimensions of metadata management and cross-entity process coordination that are less pronounced in single-jurisdiction businesses. Our engagements are shaped by this context — the frameworks we develop are designed to work across the entity structures and regional reporting relationships that are common among Singapore-based organisations.
Interested in Working Together?
Start with a brief conversation. We will ask a few questions about your current setup and suggest the engagement format most likely to be useful.
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