How do you train and educate your staff and partners on contract standardization and simplification?

During this first step, knowing your stakeholders is critical to creating a great contract. Each stakeholder has unique interests, objectives, and concerns, and understanding them is essential to ensure that the contract meets their needs and expectations. For example, if you're creating a contract with a supplier, understanding their delivery schedules, quality standards, and pricing requirements can help you negotiate a better deal that benefits both parties. Likewise, understanding your client's needs and expectations can help you create a contract that delivers value and builds trust. Ultimately, the more you know about your stakeholders, the better positioned you are to create a contract that is beneficial for everyone involved.

In my experience I have found that recognition of risks and the ability to be able to react to them when they arise, goes back in large part to effective communication and the capability of all parties being aware of what each other brings to the process.

Setting clear contract principles is foundational for any legal department. They not only guide the negotiation but also anchor the entire contractual process. Legal design adds immense value here. It ensures these principles, whether it's clarity or compliance, are easily understood and visually accessible. By adopting a user-centric approach, legal design transforms abstract principles into tangible guidelines.

Implementing legal design principles while developing contract templates shall transform contracts into user-friendly documents. For example, a software company that frequently enters into a licensing agreement could use legal design by adopting: 1. Simple Language: Convert jargon to plain English. 2. Visuals: Add icons or flowcharts for complex clauses, such as software updates or termination rights. 3. Modular Structure: Segment the contract for easy customization. 4. Interactive Elements: In digital versions, use dropdowns or links for clarity. The result? A concise, clear contract leading to quicker negotiations and strengthened business ties.

Having a contract template is a great way to capture the risk your organization is willing to tolerate and have a baseline of terms. Just remember every project is different and building flexibility into your templates can help ease the stress of negotiations. In my experience, tracking negotiations and doing an annual review of templates is extremely helpful and can help serve as an internal audit on best practices.

Your contract review process should be a collaborative one. While a contract is a legal document, the contract management and review process is a cross-functional exercise meaning that you want to ensure your key stakeholders, e.g. finance, sales, IT, privacy all are privy to the contract and are able to provide input and review as needed. A collaborative contract management solution can help you achieve this without needing to sort through confusing email threads and countless versions of the contract document.

Ultimately, contracting is a people-first exercise. The contracts are put into action by people. People draft its terms. You want your contract practices to be consistent, reliable, and simple. This starts by understanding your people, their roles and functions, and enabling them via education and training to be active participants in the contracting process.

In today's digital age, a proactive approach to contracting is pivotal. Contract standardization isn't just about templating—this is a mindset shift that must be adopted and actively promoted within the organization. With the blend of legal tech and design, we can employ interactive tools and visual aids to drive understanding.For example, hosting workshops, where teams co-create contract templates using these tools, can be particularly effective. Through this hands-on approach, principles like clarity and fairness are experienced, not just taught. Over time, such collaborative sessions can foster a culture where everyone feels invested in, and accountable for, clear and concise contracts.