Contract design

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. When your contracts aren’t user-friendly (badly structured, written in legalese), it can lead to one of two Pretty Bad Things:

1) miscommunication (if people misunderstand the contract)
2) un-communication (if they don’t read the contract at all, because it feels like an impossible task)

A contract that’s hard for one of the parties to read and understand is a risky one, because it’s likely that they will interpret it differently. Cue unmet expectations, disappointment, and before long, you may have a dispute.

Contract design prevents that by making these contracts easy to read and understand. When you create contracts with the user in mind, you stop seeing them as a tool written by lawyers for lawyers. It 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.

Here are some of the brilliant ‘side effects’ of applying legal design to your contracts:

• shorter negotiation times
• better risk management
• reduced litigation risk
• better internal and external client relationships

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

For a complete overview of how your contract can improve, our 360 Contract Design Scan is the ideal starting point. After we discuss your goals and align on what you want to achieve, simply send us your contract for review. We’ll analyse its structure, language and design with a focus on enhancing navigation, readability and overall clarity. You'll receive a set of practical recommendations to create a user-friendly contract that fully supports your business objectives while remaining 100% legally compliant. 

After the scan, you’ll have two options:

1. Implement the recommendations yourself
   With a clear set of recommendations in hand, you can confidently apply them at a pace that works for you.
2. Let us redesign for you
   We can take on the redesign to transform your contract into a visually appealing, user-centered contract that drives your business forward.

We create easy to use templates in Microsoft Word that are fully customizable. They’re designed with easy customization in mind, allowing you to make quick updates during your yearly contract review. Using Word means you’ll have full control over updates whenever you need. We also make sure that our redesigned documents can easily integrate with your existing contract automation or other systems. 

Take a look at some examples made in Word.