Over the weekend I noticed a blog post prepared by LegalSifter’s marketing team (here), with no input from me, to publicize Adams Contracts’ new service agreement template and the free 30-minute webinar we’re doing on 16 January 2025 at 1:30 p.m. ET. The blog post is entitled Draft Smarter, Not Harder: Revolutionizing Contract Drafting with the New Adams Contracts Service Agreement Template.
You might think the title is standard overblown marketing prose. But the word “revolutionizing” is exactly the right word—unlikely as it might seem, what Adams Contracts is doing is revolutionary.
Clear, Concise, and Relevant
There’s nothing revolutionary about the technology. Document automation (also known as document assembly) has been around for decades, and for decades it has been falling short of expectations. (See this 2023 blog post.) But Adams Contracts is doing document automation differently: instead of creating customizable templates for an organization, we’re creating highly customizable templates for everyone to use.
That might not seem particularly revolutionary. Aren’t we just offering a standard product to a broader market?
Like all document automation, Adams Contracts present our users with an interview with questions, a choice of answers, and guidance. When you’re done, with two clicks you get a contract that reflects your choices. But our templates give you a rich decision tree of choices for structuring your deal. Our service agreement template contains around 200 questions—that's a guesstimate—although no user would be asked anywhere near that many questions. The decision tree and the provisions expressing choices made in the interview reflect the input of specialists under my editorial control. (See this recent blog post.) And the contract follows the guidelines in my book A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting (MSCD), now in its fifth edition. The result is contracts that are clear, concise, and relevant.
Dysfunction
To fully understand the implications of what Adams Contracts offers, you have to consider that due to generations of copy-and-pasting and due to the legalistic mindset, mainstream contract drafting is dysfunctional, both in what it says and how it says it (see the introduction to MSCD). I’ve devoted the past 25 years to chronicling the dysfunction in excruciating detail. Salesforce’s master subscription agreement? Dysfunctional. Drafting by English “Magic Circle” law firms? Dysfunctional and dysfunctional. Practical Law templates? Dysfunctional. Textbooks on contract drafting? Dysfunctional. I could go on.
If you want to fix the dysfunction, your first step is to become an informed consumer of contract language. Anyone with a copy of MSCD and sufficient application and semantic acuity can achieve that. But that leaves us with the bigger task—creating contracts that are clear, concise, and relevant. Most of us aren’t in a position to do that. (See this recent blog post about that.) Hence Adams Contracts.
Another alternative to mainstream contract drafting is companies that promote standard-form initiatives—they give away a proposed standard form and offer, for a fee, a platform for negotiating transactions using the standard form. That approach has value, but for a limited range of transactions and with limited customization. That’s not what Adams Contracts offers.
Why Adams Contracts?
Necessarily, we’re starting small. A year ago we made available templates for creating confidentiality agreements and for creating boilerplate—the “miscellaneous provisions” in pretty much every contract. We’ve now launched our new service agreement template, which is more ambitious.
Relying on someone else’s contracts requires a leap of faith. You should be willing to make that leap with Adams Contracts. No one has come close to matching my work on the building blocks of contract language. And I have the insight to develop alternatives to confusing provisions the transactional world can’t seem to rid itself of. (For example, see this 2022 blog post about my alternative to relying on the phrase consequential damages.) And thanks to many years of writing, editing, and being edited, I can be trusted with editorial control of the work of specialists.
And I’m committed to civic virtue—doing what one can to foster a functioning civic society. You can only work with the tools at your disposal, and in my case that happens to be my study of contracts. So I’ve dedicated myself to creating order in contracts, to free us of the chaos and waste of the current dysfunction.
Better, Not Perfect
Our new service agreement template isn’t perfect. It covers only some basic kinds of service agreements. I don't do deals, so some users might set me straight on parts of the interview and the resulting contract. And an expansive decision tree leaves places for glitches to hide.
But any such shortcomings won’t define our templates. Compared with the systemic dysfunction of traditional contract drafting, they’re an inconvenience to be addressed through ongoing quality control. Furthermore, there's no such thing as a perfect contract template if it's intended for the broader market—it wouldn't be feasible to capture all possible permutations.
Overcoming Inertia
Offering something that’s better doesn’t by itself constitute revolution. Revolution connotes overthrowing the established order, and overthrowing something connotes resistance.
In the case of mainstream contract drafting, the resistance is inertia. I have first-hand experience with inertia. For example, whenever I decide, on a whim, to analyze a big-company contract, I make a point of contacting that company to see if they’d be interested in discussing what I’ve found. So far, in each case the result has been silence. I’ve decided that generally, companies aren’t interested in exploring shortcomings in their templates, to the point that they hide under their desk when I come knocking.
Possible explanations for inertia present themselves. One is that overhauling your contract templates is hard work. (See this 2024 blog post.) Another is that it’s easy to ignore the consequences of bad drafting. (See this 2024 blog post.) A third is that if someone challenges how you’ve been drafting contracts your entire career, you might be inclined to ignore that criticism. (See this 2013 blog post.) Or maybe you just can’t be bothered. (See this 2018 blog post.) There might be others. (See the blog post linked to in the immediately preceding link for a list of different forms of inertia.)
Such is the power of inertia that it seems companies prefer to slap an “excellence” label on their contracting rather than actually check whether it’s excellent. (See this 2021 blog post.)
Challenges
Our promise to those who use our templates is that we give you a rich decision tree of choices for structuring your deal—way more choices than are available to the copy-and-paster. We’ve also turned into a commodity task coming up with verbiage to reflect your choices.
But that poses two challenges. One is that for many drafters, coming up with the verbiage is a significant part of their vocational identity. And for law firms, it can be a meaningful part of how they make their money. But it’s a waste—it’s time to leave it behind.
But the bigger challenge might be the number of questions we ask users in the template interview. The problem isn’t that users must keep repeating the same answers to questions—you can reuse answer sets, so you can zip through interviews for transactions that resemble previous transactions. Instead, the issue is that when you copy-and-paste, many decisions have already been made for you. I expect that some who encounter our decision tree will be outraged—too many questions!
Our decision tree is a feature, not a bug. There’s the notion out there that you should keep as short as possible the time an organization spends drafting contracts. (See for example this LinkedIn post by Thomson Reuters.) For coming up with the verbiage, I say amen to that. But deciding the form of a deal is the highest function of those doing deals, and usually it takes time to think through those issues. Would you really rather reuse decisions made by others, for other deals? Adams Contracts templates are intended for those who want to make a fresh start. A fresh start requires a full range of choices. But if you'd find it helpful, LegalSifter can help you complete an interview, and so can our specialists.
What About AI?
Those who work with contracts might also wonder why they should use fuddy-duddy document-automation software when we have access to something as ostensibly momentous as generative artificial intelligence.
Well, for contract drafting, AI is a souped-up copy-and-paste machine. Feed AI the dysfunction of mainstream contract drafting, and the AI will serve up to you some version of that dysfunction. Adding to the mess is AI’s tendency to be erratic. If you want to weed out, after the fact, whatever is dysfunctional or erratic, you’ll spend a lot of time on what should be commodity work.
Given that contracts mostly feature continuously recurring patterns, and given the systemic dysfunction, it makes much more sense to use for contract drafting a locked-down document-automation system that features interviews with extensive decision trees (built with the help of specialists) and contract language that’s clear and concise. That’s what Adams Contracts uses.
The Revolution Isn’t Guaranteed
Inertia has a tight grip on the world of business contracts. And many online products and services are in the throes of enshittification. So it’s not a given that the revolution sought by Adams Contracts will come to pass.
But I’m hopeful. After all, I single-handedly created the field of rigorous study of the building blocks of contract language. MSCD has sold tens of thousands of copies. And I’ve given hundreds of training presentations around the world (in person and now primarily online) to companies, law firms, government agencies, and the public.
If anyone wants to apply to their contracts the approach of MSCD or just wants to be well and truly free of the copy-and-paste machine, Adams Contracts’ templates are your only option. Just as I was the only person willing to do the work reflected in MSCD, it appears I’m the only one with the stomach for building a library of highly customizable templates.
I invite you to help bring about the revolution by subscribing to Adams Contracts templates.
