Introduction
This post compares two activities that are artisanal—baking pizza and drafting contracts—and compares the effect of instead making each of those activities industrial. Spoiler alert—for pizza, the consequence are bad, whereas for contracts, the consequences are good. I wrote the pizza part just because I though it provided an interesting contrast to the situation facing contracts. If pizza isn't your thing, go straight to the "Contracts" heading!
Pizza
Because our daughter patronized schools in Connecticut and Massachusetts, we discovered Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, in New Haven. We routinely stopped there when traveling to or from points further north. Their pizza became what I would aim for in my own pizzas.
Our visits to Pepe's pretty much stopped when my daughter, Sydney, went to college elsewhere and then started work. But then she applied to, and ultimately started attending, Harvard Business School. So last year, on the way home after a visit to Cambridge, my wife, Joanne, and I stopped at Pepe for lunch. It was a busy day, so we were shunted to their facility next door, "The Spot." It was evidently staffed by the B team, so for the first time, we were disappointed. (And not because we were miffed at being relegated to The Spot!)
Fast forward to last Friday. I had to drive Syd to Boston to begin the second semester of her first year, so we of course agreed to swing by Pepe's. We arrived there early that evening, ordered a large tomato-and-mozzarrella pie, and ate it in our car, in Pepe's parking lot. (That's our pizza in the photo.)
Are you familiar with "flop"? That's the term for the drooping arc a slice of pizza might exhibit when you hold it horizontally by the rim. It's not a pejorative term. Neapolitan pizza—the smallish, poofy-rim pizza blasted at the hottest temperatures for maybe 90 seconds—always exhibits flop, if you breach protocol and eat slices by hand. New York-style pizza often exhibits modest flop. Same with New Haven-style pizza. Well, our slices on Friday exhibited drastic flop: when you held the rim horizontally, the rest of the slice fell vertically, at a 90-degree angle to the rim. The rim was charred beyond what was normal in Pepe's pizza, so I concur with the diagnosis Wowie K offered on Bluesky: "Heat too high so burned crust and they had to pull pie before fully cooked." (You can find me here on Bluesky.)
Baking fresh pizza is an artisanal activity. That's certainly the case when you're baking it in a coal-fired oven. At Pepe's, the floor of the oven is the size of a small room. Heat is provided by a pile of burning coal against one of the walls. Baking a pizza requires being aware of the temperature of the floor of the pizza and the temperature of the air to which the top of the pizza is exposed, and managing both, and deciding where, and for how long, to position the pizza being baked.
The state our pizza was in suggests two system failures, one relating to cooking the pizza, the other relating to quality control. If you have one instance of that kind of failure, there's no reason to assume it's the only instance.
For what it's worth, it's easy enough to find online chatter about how Pepe's has gone downhill. (See for example this Reddit thread.) Two developments are perhaps relevant. First, ownership has been transferred to Frank Pepe's grandchildren. (The main public face of Pepe's in recent years, Gary Bimonte, died in 2021.) And second, Pepe's now has—count 'em—17 locations.
It doesn't require much imagination to think that turning one location into many and handing ownership to new owners is likely to cause the artisanal side of a pizza business to suffer. That's the side that requires consistency and constant attention to the smallest details.
I have only anecdotal evidence to offer for this as a general proposition. In the aughts, Grimaldi's, in Brooklyn, was a contender for best pizza in New York City. (See Wikipedia.) Around the same time, I patronized their Garden City location and found it good enough to go there a few times. But around 2010 I walked across Brookly Bridge to have lunch at the original location; I found it mediocre. And the quality of pizza at the Garden City location fell off, of so I haven't gone there in 15 years. I suspect that growing to around 40 locations has something to do with how this has played out.
And as I note in this 2022 blog post, Joe Beddia morphed from solo pizza guy in an austere, no-seats venue to maitre d' of a regular restaurant. I thought it likely that the pizza would be less interesting as a result, and in my one visit to the then-new restaurant, I thought that was the case.
I conclude from all this that running a pizzeria is inherently an artisanal business; that artisanal businesses require constant attention and quality control; and that if you expand your business so it's on an industrial footing, you run the risk of losing what made the business successful in the first place. I leave it to others to consider whether the change is worthwhile if you stand to make more money selling mediocre pizza to a lot more people.
Contracts
Let's compare that to contracts.
Business contracts have long been drafted by copying, on faith, from precedent contracts of questionable quality and relevance. As a result, contracts are dysfunctional in what they say and how they say it and in the process used to draft them.
A consequence of relying on copy-and-pasting is that whoever is preparing the new contract has to be prepared to adjust whatever they're copy-and-pasting to make sure it reflects the circumstances of the new deal and not the circumstances of the deal expressed in the original contract. In other words, copy-and-pasting is an artisanal process.
That doesn't make sense. If you consider a stash of contracts for a given kind of transaction, you'll find that they cover broadly the same issues, with plenty of alternative provisions being selected, omitted, or modified depending on the deal circumstances. That broad consistency is masked by the different prose uses to express, from contract to contract, what is basically the same kinds of provision. It's also masked by differences in how the provisions are arranged and what enumeration scheme is used.
Drafting business contracts would be much simpler if we did away with the unnecessary artisanal work and instead made the entire process industrial by doing the following:
- Enlisting specialists to eliminate what doesn't make sense.
- Being consistent in how you express a given concept, instead of having different drafters say it differently from contract to contract.
- Making standard options readily available to drafters, instead of expecting them to figure those options out for themselves and reinvent, constantly, how those options should be expressed.
- Explaining to drafters the implications of the choices offered.
- Making all language clear and concise by complying with a comprehensive set of guidelines.
That's exacly what Adams Contracts is doing.
Implementing such a system would bring about significant change, particular at law firms. Currently, the artisanal nature of copy-and-pasting contracts is aggravated at law firms by the balkanized nature of law-firm management, with each partner doing their own thing. A junior associate might draft two contracts for the same kind of deal, but they end up being very different because the partners running the deals gave the associate two very different precedent contracts to use.
If Adams Contracts were deployed at a law firm, everyone would use the relevant Adams Contracts template to draft contracts for a given kind of transaction. In effect, lawyers wouldn't come up with decision tree of choices available—that would be a commodity. And they wouldn't have to come up with the verbiage to reflect their choices—that too would be a commodity. The lawyers would limit their work to what should be the most valuable task, determining what the deal should look like.
To those law-firm lawyers who think they have some kind of special sauce when it comes to drafting contracts, I say, Get over yourselves. There is no secret sauce, just varying degrees of dysfunction and a lot of unhelpful inconsistency and reinventing the wheel.
So let's make the revolution happen.
