Let’s assume you need a contract for a new deal. The new deal is one that matters, and it’s not a cookie-cutter deal, so you want to address in the contract some issues that are particular to this deal.
In traditional contract drafting, here’s how that works. Your organization might have a template, but it offers only rudimentary customization, with a few footnotes or some text in brackets. Or you might use one or more precedent contracts that reflect choices made for some other deal. Either way, you have to come up with additional deal points that would apply to your deal, then you have to come up with suitable verbiage to reflect those deal points. And if you’re using someone else’s precedent contract, you might have to make general revisions so the contract looks more like what you’re used to.
But here’s how it works if you use our new service agreement template. (Actually, any Adams Contracts template.)
The interview presents you with an expansive decision tree. It’s not definitive—no decision tree ever could be—but thanks to document-assembly technology, it goes way beyond what you’ll find in a standard template. So you’re more likely to create a contract that’s relevant, compared with the process of trying to cobble together a new decision tree and graft it on to a contract that reflects only a limited set of options, nor no options at all.
Next, you go through the interview, reading the questions and consulting the guidance. You decide what you want your deal to look like, you answer the questions, and then you’re presented with a document that reflects your choices.
And you can rely on that document. The universe of choices offered in our service agreement template was compiled with the help of people knowledgeable about a given topic. In addition to me (for purposes of confidentiality and boilerplate), we enlisted the help of Ned Barlas (intellectual property) and Noelle McCall (insurance). (See this blog post for more about them.)
And the language used is clear and concise, because it complies with the guidelines in A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. Somehow I’ve single-handedly invented, and continue to have essentially to myself, a new field, the systematic study of how to say clearly and concisely whatever you want to say in a contract. If you don’t consult MSCD, you cannot be an informed consumer of contract language. But if you use an Adams Contracts template, you don’t have to be an informed consumer of contract language—you can simply rely on the language we use.
So the result of using our service agreement template will be that you’ll spend little or no time coming up with your own decision tree of choices. And you’ll spend little or no time coming up with your own contract verbiage, because we serve that to you on a platter. So by using our template, you’ll save time and money and you’ll reduce the risk of disputes and other suboptimal outcomes.
But I expect that initially, you’ll spend more time working your way through dozens of questions in our decision tree. Other than for purposes of a deal that should be a cookie-cutter transaction, I have no patience for anyone who squawks about how there are too many questions. Compared with time mostly wasted coming up with your own decision tree or your own contract verbiage, deciding what the deal should look like is the dealmaker’s highest calling. Anyone who complains that our templates have too many questions is trying to make a virtue of having to use dysfunctional precedent contracts or a dysfunctional template.
And remember that once you’ve completed the interview for one or more transactions, you can save a lot of time by reusing the answer set for a given interview. (See this blog post for more about that.)
