How do you start drafting and reviewing contracts with contract templates?

While drafting a Contract Template, looking out online for an already existing Template is not new. The only important differentiating factor is, one should look for the guidelines and not copy the entire agreement. Every agreement is different. Change in domain shifts the thought process to draft. Liability and Indemnification capacity of different organisations vary. If the agreement draft is not customised to the organisation's needs, as a Contract attorney we are not doing justice to our job.

The practice of cut, copy and paste withour application of mind by legal draftsman has proved to be fatal. Before drafting any contarct, thorough skill of the subject matter is a pre requiste for any contact. Lawyers are not technical experts. Hence expert knowledge of technically sound professional must be taken to understand complexities involved.

In my experience before creating templates and trying to look for software, you must know the stakeholders needs, draft what you have received in terms of feedback, adapt to the specific project or product -depending on applicable law and/or local regulations-. Share the draft with stakeholders and determine if any changes must be made. Run a few scenarios to ensure what was planned actually works. After a few iterations by learning, adapt and change, there’s no perfect contract!

Wht Jaydeep says is entirely true. Lawyers will see from legal perspective. Technical person will provide the details and see those aspects are covered. But ultimately you need a person with business background and experts to integrate both the aspects well without compromising on commercial or legal aspects. Ultimately the commercial view point needs to be safeguarded thru legal drafting.

While choosing the template it would also be imperative that a map tracing key terms are generated. Roles and responsibilities of each party as well as a requirement list be generated which can be used to taper a chosen template

In my experience this is crucial because some clauses might require to be tapered to the deal at hand and at other times additions or modifications are given in order to generate the best version of the template suitable for your deal

I strongly believe that Cut, Copy, and Paste (without application of Mind) doesn't exist Anymore. Contract Management - is maturing fast & with great learnings (by contributions) flocking on platforms like this, it's only going to improve further.

Use MS word track changes to show all edits. Use notes to explain changes. Note can refer to the departures schedule, which is a table (I use a spreadsheet ) that tracks each change and allows parties to make comments, express opinions, offer options, or accept each change. This usually goes though a number of iterations until the parties accept the document. This process works well during template development and during contract negotiations. You might be tempted to leave all changes on either the word Document or the spreadsheet.. I tend to use both until the last few amendments, when I only use the word document. With the spreadsheet, you can filter out all the closed ( accepted) changes. This way the list gets shorter.