Do you wonder whether the deal terms in your contract templates are relevant? Do customers find your deal terms unreasonable? In revising your templates, are you stuck in drafting-by-committee limbo? Is your process for creating contracts from your templates too slow? Do you struggle to customize your contracts to reflect the requirements of different deals?
If you answered “Yes” to any of those questions, Adams Contracts’ highly customizable templates would help you overcome those problems, so your deals closer faster and with greater likelihood of an optimal outcome.
And using an Adams Contracts template is now easier, because we now offer template services. In this post I’ll tell you what our template services consist of, then I'll tell you why we’re offering them.
What
Our template services include the following with respect to a given template:
- Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s current template, to identify, among other things, provisions that are an obstacle to getting deals done quickly and provisions that are overlong or otherwise don’t add enough value. For an example of the kind of analysis I can offer, see my 2023 critique of Practical Law’s mutual confidentiality agreement, here.
- Help from me and one or more subject-matter specialists in completing the interview for an Adams Contracts template, to help explain questions and guidance and to help with answering questions that require specialized advice that goes beyond the guidance.
- Help in identifying relevant issues not addressed in the Adams Contracts template and making changes to reflect those issues. Those changes are either added to the template or kept bespoke—just for the organization.
- Having the organization subscribe to the Adams Contracts template.
- If the organization does enough transactions, with enough customization, to make it worthwhile, creating and hosting for the organization a version of the Adams Contracts template with changes requested by the organization.
- Creating a playbook to address fallback options.
- Offering training to the organization’s contracts personnel on what’s different about the organization’s new template.
- Offering Drafting Clearer Contracts training to the organization.
Why
Adams Contracts offers businesses a way to create templates that’s very different from what they’re used to. With template services, we help businesses adjust to using our templates, and our specialized knowledge helps make for an optimal result.
Using an Adams Contracts template requires completing an interview—reading questions and possible answers, consulting guidance included in the interview, then answering the questions. But we’ve learned that many people are reluctant to complete the interview.
Why might that be? It’s not because they don’t want to have to keep answering the same questions. As I explain in this 2023 blog post, you can reuse answer sets. That leaves another explanation—it’s a result of the contracts world being wedded to copy-and-pasting to create contracts.
When you’re copy-and-pasting, you’re not presented with a broad range of choices—what I call a “decision tree”—that allows you to select those deal points that address your needs. Instead, you’re presented with decisions that were made for some other transaction. Or if you’re dealing with a Word template that offers choices, whether expressed in footnotes or bracketed language, you’re presented with a stunted decision tree, one that’s nothing like the many-branched decision tree in an Adams Contracts template.
It follows that most people who work with contracts aren’t used to answering questions. Answering questions takes time—you might think your time is better spent revising contract language, not answering questions. You might even be asked questions you’re not equipped to answer. For example, questions regarding intellectual property or insurance.
But the questions and guidance in an interview are a feature, not a bug. They give users the best chance for a deal that’s tailored to your organization’s needs.
But just saying so won’t change anyone’s mind. Instead, with template services, I and one or more specialists (as necessary) will join you in completing the interview and will walk you through your options.
The other components of our services reflect that creating a new template involves more than the interview process. We’ll be there at every step. And no one can match our expertise.
How much do template services cost? That depends on what services you want and the nature of your transaction. Currently, we have only three templates—for confidentiality agreements, boilerplate, and service agreements—so our services are currently limited to those kinds of contract—or in the case of boilerplate, that part of any kind of contract. (We’ve started work on a fourth template, with more to follow.)
If you’d like to discuss our template services, contact me at ken@legalsifter.com.
