Clients wonder sometimes what they are getting into when they ask a lawyer to draft a contract. Maybe their fear is that their attorney will sharpen up his metaphorical pencil, lean his chair back to think deeply on life and law for an hour or two (on the clock), and then pull out the laptop and sit down to drafts things up from scratch, like a composer writing out each note to a (very boring) symphony. The client may fear that the lawyer views every deal is different, that everything about every deal is new every time, that everything needs to be tailored like a bespoke suit.

Every deal is different, it’s often said – I’ve heard myself say it a hundred times. That’s because the facts are different, and that’s because no two people and no two companies are alike or have the exact same priorities. But that doesn’t mean that two deals – say, two leases of refrigerated warehouse space, or two agreements for the purchase of the assets of small businesses — happening 500 miles apart (or 5000 or 5) — can’t be done with forms of contract that are 90% the same.

In fact, they probably should be done that way.

And your attorney shouldn’t be spending a whole lot of time going for the Pulitzer Prize for creative nonfiction and drafting that 90% (just a percentage used for illustration purposes) from scratch.

Unless we are speaking of some sort of business deal where the industry is utterly new, the parties are utterly idiosyncratic, and the risk tolerances are off the charts (one direction or the other), or all of the above, the same basic forms work across the board. I remember Internet 1.0 – the days of AOL and Pets.com — and the ways that lawyers were trying to draft “application service provider” contracts that expressed the concept of software programs being accessed over the Internet (what we now call Software as a Service (SaaS)). But even in that time, when the Internet was beginning to utterly change the way the world operated, the contracts were pretty much built right on top of software, consulting, joint venture and financing contracts that had been around for decades before that.

The majority of the text in a contract from 1975 (the year of the room-sized computer) – for example, events of default, remedies on default, representations and warranties, indemnification, assignment, the boilerplate at the end, and the general flow and sequence of the document — was essentially the same as the text in a contract drafted in 2000 (the year of the Pets.com sock puppet). The same is even more true for commercial real estate contracts, and even holds true for many types of intellectual property agreements.

And it goes without saying that 90% of the text in an accounting SaaS services agreement from 2017 is going to be the same as a payroll SaaS services agreement from 2019.

Anyone who tells it differently is trying to create mystery where there really should be none.

That’s my candid and honest observation How does this insight relate to you?

As outside corporate general counsel, under our OPENgc service offering, GreeneHurlocker is keenly focused on saving a client time and money while still delivering the legal assistance a client needs, when they need it. We avoid reinventing wheels. We’ve been practicing enough years, in widely varying industries and for companies of all sizes, to have an experienced, intuitive sense of what works and what doesn’t, and how the work we’ve done before may apply to the work we are doing for a client now. When a client picks up the phone and asks for an individual contract to be done or an entire deal to be quarterbacked, the client can rest assured we are not starting from scratch. Instead, we’re applying all the knowledge and work we have already done.

We’re here to guide you to the end of your deal. But we also know where to start.

Author

Jared Burden
jburden@greenehurlocker.com
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