Contract design

Better contracts mean better business. Fundamentally, contracts are tools: structured communications that aim to reconcile the parties' expectations. A tool should speed up your business, not block it or slow it down - but in the real world, not all contracts work so well. 

Contract design makes you rethink the contract from the actual user's perspective: for example, a client who has to sign the contract, or salespeople who will be negotiating it? The result: contracts that are easy to navigate, read and understand. Contracts that drive your business forward faster. 

Contract design can take many forms. For each case, the right choice will depend on things like the type of end-users (B2C or B2B), the level of contract automation, and the specific objectives you want to achieve. 

What will you learn?

• The bigger picture of legal design
  What is legal design? Why legal design? What are the application possibilities? What’s in it for you as a legal counsel? How to overcome the barriers that prevent legal counsels from using legal design? 
  
  
• How to get started with contract design
  What does a typical contract design process look like? Which tools can we use in each step of the design process? 
  
  
• Which design techniques you can use to improve the navigation, readability and comprehension of your contracts
  Learn to create contracts in which wording, structure and design are so clear that your users can easily find what they need, understand what they read and use that information.
  
  
• How to use visual elements in contracts
  Why is visual communication so powerful? How to use visual elements (e.g. colour, icons, graphs) meaningfully? 
  
  
• How to redesign contracts in Word 
  How to apply various plain language and design techniques to turn your text-heavy documents into visually appealing documents that are more clear, concise and better structured. 
  
  

Objectives and outcomes

• You will understand why and how contract design is a benefit to any legal department. 
• You will learn the basic principles of contract design in a practical and accessible way so that you can immediately apply these principles in your own context. 

Practical information

• 4-hour interactive training session (in person)
• Dutch or English
• No prior knowledge or preparation required
• We create easy to use documents in Microsoft Word that are fully customizable and in line with your brand. We also make sure that our redesigned documents can easily integrate with your existing contract automation or other systems.