Steps Law Firms Can Take to Manage the Contract-Drafting Process
AdamsDrafting:
Law firms could take a number of steps to put their contract drafting on a more rational footing. They could adopt a contract-drafting “house style” that recommends usages to employ and usages to steer clear of. They could offer rigorous training. And they could implement a centralized template initiative, maybe even one that makes use of document-assembly technology.
But in the course of giving in-house seminars at law firms in the past couple of weeks, I was reminded of the obstacles that law firms face in implementing such measures.
“Our workload is too varied and unpredictable”
It’s likely that any given law firm is called on to draft a broad and unpredictable range of contracts. Some of those contracts might relate to transactions that the law firm handles routinely; others might relate to transactions that come along only sporadically. (By contrast, a company that sells widgets can expect to use a limited set of templates hundreds or thousands of times a year, with those transactions representing the bulk of its contract load.)
The broad range of contracts a given law firm is asked to draft doesn’t preclude a centralized template initiative. Instead, it goes to the cost-benefit analysis. The odds are that any given law firm drafts some kinds of contracts often enough to warrant some measure of commoditization. That might be limited to preparation of annotated templates in Word, but something more elaborate would probably be called for, such as the document-assembly tool QShift. Or even DealBuilder, which the biggest U.K. firms and an increasing number of U.S. firms are using. That’s because any law-firm template would likely be used in a different kinds of transactions for different clients, so you’d want to have built-in adaptability.
For a template initiative to have a real impact, a firm would have to commit meaningful resources…