Important information about Email communication
You told the communications firm (seller) about the conflict and the delay in the project. The seller is very concerned that it will be penalized according to its contract because it will be unable to meet the dates specified and the graphics are not available. The seller has asked you to sit down with a few of its representatives for a few hours to reschedule the deliverable dates. The vendor will then craft a revised statement of work (SOW) for you to sign off and resubmit to the legal and purchasing departments. The seller has said that it will not do any further work until the new statement of work is signed off and is implemented, but the seller has not canceled any of the upcoming working sessions. You are hoping the situation with the intranet seller will be resolved without any impact to the project schedule, eliminating the need to make changes to any seller's procurement statement of work.
If all goes well, it will take about 3 weeks to get the change requests processed through the change control system, approved by legal, verified by the seller, and implemented by purchasing. It will require a significant amount of time from you as well. Even if you can make the time in your own schedule, you know that it will be very difficult to get time from legal to work on the communications firm's issue because legal is busy dealing with the intranet seller situation. You also know that the communications firm had bad experiences working with LRH before. This seller was threatened with penalties by LRH because it missed deadlines. The delays were caused by mismanagement on LRH's side, not by the seller. To resolve the conflict, the seller had to forfeit a significant amount of fees. You know that is why the seller has said the things it has said.
Make an e-mail to the communications firm describing how you will move ahead with the contract and what actions you would like it to take next. Discuss your reaction to the seller's past litigation experience, and decide what you will do to avoid a similar situation.