Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash
Redesigning your contract using Legal Design Principles presents a way to streamline contracts to make them more understandable to everyone who read them. Achieving such level of standardization means your contracts are clear, legible and binding.
Simpler contracts benefit organizations as they improve business relationships, reduce risks, and deliver outcomes more efficiently. When you view contracts as core business-critical economic instruments with a range of diverse purposes, you can start redesigning your contract using Legal Design Principles to make them clearer and more efficient.
One approach to contract simplification turns to blockchain technology and smart contracts to improve both the content and presentation of contract management.
Smart contracts offer a way to simplify contracts, automate their execution and keep a record that cannot be altered on the blockchain.
But before you move onto digitizing and automating your contract templates, you need to be sure that your contracts make sense for the businesses and people using them.
Luigi Telesca
You can start by redesigning your contract using Legal Design Principles to create clearer contracts
You can use them with existing drafting and style guides to achieve clearer communication.
Bear in mind that contract terms should be as clear and concise as possible. You can achieve this by eliminating unnecessary language and crafting the remaining, legalistic language into more standard English.
If you do not consider how to foster transparency, fairness, trust, and ease of doing business with in your contracts, you risk losing the relationship.
Romina Zorzini
Redesigning your contract using Legal Design Principles can be done around each business’ specific needs. You can take different steps and choose to automate specific parts of the process.
Some organizations go for light touch language editing as part of information architecture restructuring, document design, and UX, and contract visualization.
The reason why you can optimize contracts using legal design principles is because a design pattern presents a repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem.
Design patterns and libraries to collect them are widely used tools, for example, in software engineering and user interface design. Practitioners from those fields collect best-practice solutions emerging as robust from repeated use.
Organizations can then borrow and adapt the concept although you need to make changes to the images or texts. This is necessary because contracts need to reflect your brand, your visual guidelines, your language and tone of voice, and the specifics of your business.
Design is, at its core, a method for problem-solving in context and content is a crucial part of contract design. Smart contracts offer the flexibility you need to create good models for approaching problems, but you need to add your own contextual knowledge and goals to the mix to create meaningful solutions.
When you redesign your contract with Legal Design Principles, you can streamline your contract management process. This can boost your revenue and grow your business. You can learn more about Trakti’s features and how they can help you improve existing contractual obligations here.
