The Terms Warden
Reading vendor terms like old curses — after someone picked up the artifact
The Terms Warden appears whenever a team has wandered too close to a contract edge. They read vendor terms the way a dungeon keeper reads old curses: carefully, literally, and usually after someone has already picked up the glowing artifact. The Terms Warden will notice something. It might be a new vendor, or a way in which two vendor products are being combined to support a feature, and they will flag it — after the feature is already in production.
Symptom
The Warden identifies valid compliance concerns in vendor terms, but the timing makes them expensive to address. Nobody wants to be the person who shut down a working system over a terms-of-service interpretation.
Why It Matters
The Terms Warden's concerns are almost always legitimate. The problem is structural: they're reading the contract after the organization has already built emotional and operational dependency on the product.
What the Chapter Gives You
Why terms review needs to happen before integration, not after, and how the social dynamics of 'shutting down a working system' make the Warden's findings politically impossible to act on.
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