There’s a difference between being an expert and having experience.
I consider myself an expert on the building blocks of contract language, but it would be odd to think in terms of my having experience in that topic. Instead, in effect I’m a scholar. You don’t have experience in scholarship, you build it.
Having experience in something connotes being exposed to it in a practical sense. In that regard, I have essentially no dealmaking experience. I haven’t done deals in over 20 years, and what dealmaking experience I have can be considered a wasting asset—it has pretty much wasted away.
I think of expertise and experience as having the same mass, but expertise is narrow and deep, whereas experience is broader and shallower. (This is analogous to the notion of T-shaped skills.)
Someone might combine both expertise and experience. For example, I’ve found that intellectual property tends to be sufficiently gnarly that even for doing deals, it helps to have a background in the subject that’s deep enough that it could be considered expertise. My longtime IP whisperer, Ned Barlas, offers an example of that.
Why say all this? Because to create contract templates—something that’s on my mind—you need both expertise and experience.
My expertise in the building blocks of contract language and some contract substance is obviously relevant, but it’s nowhere near enough. I’d likely need others to supply expertise in topics such as intellectual property, healthcare regulation, or insurance, but even adding that wouldn’t be enough. For the kind of templates Adams Contracts is building—highly customizable templates—you also need dealmaking experience, and lots of it. You need to know what options a user might want access to in different contexts. It’s unlikely that any one person would have the breadth of experience to single-handedly come up with all those options. Instead, I’d want to crowdsource that experience.
Crowdsourcing is something I’ve disdained in the past. See for example this 2014 blog post on crowdsourcing contract repositories. And I’ve said that crowdsourcing the contract language for a standard-form initiative is a route to mediocrity.
But to come up with options to offer in a document-assembly contract template, crowdsourcing allows me to tap into people’s experience. And I wouldn’t uncritically accept whatever options are offered. Instead, I would use the different perspectives offered to come up with a balanced whole: crowdsourcing is best combined with editorial control.
So, yes, the optimal combination for ambitious contract templates is expertise—my expertise, the expertise of others—combined with crowdsourced deal experience combined with editorial control.
