Hi. I’m Ken Adams, contract-drafting guy. I’m author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. If you’re a contracts person, you might have encountered me through my writings or through the training I offer. (You can find more about me here.)
For five years I’ve been working with LegalSifter, a combined-intelligence company that aims to help with all parts of the contracts process. For the past couple of years, I’ve been an employee, serving as their chief content officer. But things have now gotten serious, because I’ve been appointed head of Adams Contracts, a new division of LegalSifter. (This is the first post on the Adams Contracts blog.)
At Adams Contracts, we’ll do what I’ve wanted to do since forever—create highly customizable contract templates. Consult the annotations and complete the interview and you’ll get a contract that is clear, concise, and addresses your needs. It’s overwhelmingly likely that it will be of much higher quality than anything your organization or any outside law firm could put together. And it will cost you much less, and you’ll get it much faster.
For reasons I explain in this blog post, we’re starting small—with a confidentiality agreement template and a boilerplate template.
Those who have followed me for a while will have a sense of déja vu. Ten years ago I created an automated confidentiality agreement. I was helped by Business Integrity, developers of the document-assembly software Contract Express (now owned by Thomson Reuters). I was pleased with that template, but it was an utter business failure. It was unreasonable for me to expect to get anywhere with my one-guy-and-a-lemonade-stand operation.
After ten years of knocking on doors, I’m back in business with the same approach, but this time with the backing of LegalSifter and its owners, Carrick Capital Partners. If you’re not satisfied with your contracts and you’re tired of the dysfunction that comes with relying on copy-and-pasting, try Adams Contracts.
This wouldn’t have happened without the support of Kevin Miller, LegalSifter’s chief executive officer. Kevin is the only person who has asked me to help build something to help with the contracts process. That’s a tribute to Kevin’s imagination.
Meanwhile, pardon our dust: for a few days you might see on this site the virtual equivalent of workers applying a final lick of paint, installing fixtures, and changing the carpet.
