What happens to two sets of contracts after an acquisition?

Completion is treated as the end of the document work. It is the beginning of it.

What exists on the day after completion is two template libraries, two sets of standard terms, two lease registers, two employment document sets, two ways of approving anything, and no decision about which governs. Everybody involved in the transaction has moved on to integration of the things that are visibly urgent (systems, people, customers) and the document layer is nobody's item.

So both sets stay live. New customers get whichever set the person selling them happens to use. Eighteen months later the question surfaces again, usually because somebody is preparing for the next transaction.

The decisions are small and nobody makes them

Per document class, the decision is genuinely simple: which set governs from now on, and what happens to the other. Customer terms, supplier terms, employment documents by role, leases, governance documents, policies.

It is simple and it still does not happen, for a predictable reason. Nobody owns it. The acquiring business assumes theirs governs, the acquired team keeps using what they know, and neither position is written down anywhere. The absence of a decision is itself a decision, made by default, in favour of drift.

What makes it happen is putting the differences in front of one person with authority and asking them to choose, class by class, in one sitting.

Side-by-side, in neutral language

The artefact that makes the decision possible is a difference sheet per overlapping class: the clause, what each side says, in plain language.

It must not lean. A sheet that describes one side's payment terms as "stronger" has made the decision on behalf of the person who is supposed to make it, and made it without knowing the commercial context. State what each says. Let them choose, with advice where the choice needs it.

The retired set has to stay findable

This is the part that gets missed, and it is the part that causes trouble years later.

Retiring a set of terms does not retire the contracts already signed on it. Those counterparties are still on the old document, and when one of them raises something in 2029, somebody has to be able to identify exactly what they signed.

So the superseded set is archived, not deleted, and it is archived in a way that makes any document identifiable: version identifiers intact, index maintained, clearly marked as superseded rather than merely old. The version scheme for the merged set should make an origin identifiable too, so it is obvious whether a given document descends from one business or the other.

Do it while the people are still there

The single biggest factor in what this costs is whether anybody from the acquired business is still available to say where things are.

That knowledge is not documented anywhere. It is in the head of the person who ran their operations, and it is exactly the kind of role that turns over in the first year after an acquisition. Once they have gone, establishing what the acquired business actually had becomes archaeology, and the same work costs several times as much.

If an acquisition has completed and this has not been done, the window is closing at a predictable rate.

What good looks like afterwards

One library. One current version per class. A version scheme that shows where a document came from. A decision record naming who chose what and when, which is worth as much as the merged set itself, because the question "why are we on these terms" gets asked, and an answer of "the operations director chose them in March, here are the alternatives that were in front of her" is a very different answer from silence.

And a list of the counterparties still on retired documents, so that dealing with them is a decision rather than a discovery.

The boundary

Building the difference sheets, archiving the retired set and keeping the decision record is filing work. Stating what each side's clause says is filing work too, as long as it stays descriptive.

What any difference between the two sets actually does, which position leaves the business better placed, and what the transaction documents themselves require of the merged library are questions for your own external adviser.

The difference sheet is what makes their involvement affordable. Eleven located differences across six document classes is a bounded question. Two template libraries and an instruction to compare them is not.