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Most contracts are made up of provisions that rarely change. The names of the parties, the pricing, and the length of the term may change, but the rest will likely stay the same. However, when you get a new contract from a company you don’t know yet, you still need to have your attorney read through the entire contract to be sure the other side didn’t slip in anything unfair or unexpected.
When she reads through that contract, your attorney will likely feel like she needs to change some things in your favor, so that she can prove her value. After those changes, the attorneys will likely go back and forth until they reach a reasonable middle ground that is acceptable to both sides.
The whole process will likely cost you and your business contact thousands of dollars, depending on the tenacity and stubbornness of your attorneys.
But why can’t we start out with a contract that is already fair to both sides? Then the attorneys could just read through the contract once, knowing that it was drafted by an unbiased party with fairness as the principal goal. Negotiations on the legal boilerplate would be drastically reduced on your first contract, and on following contracts, they would be eliminated entirely. The only negotiations would be on the pricing and other terms that are specific to each contract.
We have been drafting and negotiating commercial contracts for decades, and we know how all the haggling usually ends. It’s amazing how almost all contracts that are negotiated by good lawyers end up with the same basic provisions.
So we’ve written “standardized contracts” that we offer as templates for our customers. By starting out with a fair standardized contract, our customers avoid the necessity of paying lawyers to read through every new contract. Instead, they have their lawyers read through the template and recommend changes, and then our customers issue an invitation to their business contacts with the revisions called out.
If the other side has already used Standardized Contracts, they don’t even need to read through the contract. They can just review the revisions and can either accept them or propose changes. If they need to make other changes, they can also propose those other changes.
When you want to invite one of your business contacts to enter into a Standardized Contract with you, you will first go to StandardizedContracts.com
Once you’ve selected the template you want to use, you’ll begin filling in the contact information for the parties, such as names, email addresses, etc.
Then you’ll get to the Basic Agreement Information, where you’ll choose terms that are specific to your contract, such as the length of the term of your contract and the pricing for your services.
Once you review those items and click “Next,” you’ll go to a page where you can type in Variations you want to make to the template form. Variations are changes you make to terms that typically do not change. For example, a non-disclosure agreement will typically have an exception for information that is required to be disclosed by court order, but if you don’t want to have an exception for court-ordered disclosures, you can reference the section number where you want to make a change and type in the change in the field provided.
Once you’ve entered any Variations, you’ll review everything, sign the form, and enter your credit card information. Your business contact will receive an email notifying her that you have issued a Standardized Contract.
Once your business contact clicks on the link she receives, she will be taken to your proposed contract on StandardizedContracts.com, where she will be able to review the standardized template and your changes. She can then accept or reject your changes, and even make changes of her own.
If she agrees to all of the terms you have proposed, she can simply sign where indicated and accept the contract. Since you’ve already signed on your side, once your business contact accepts and signs, you have a binding contract!
If your business contact doesn’t agree to your terms exactly, then you will receive an email indicating that you’ve received a counter-offer. You can then go to the contract and repeat the process. Once you’ve both agreed to all the terms and signed the contract, you’ll each get a congratulatory email that attaches the signed agreement and the template form.
As you can guess, once you start using Standardized Contracts, a world of new opportunities will open up to you. For example, in future versions of our services, you’ll be able to index and search your contracts for provisions that may be important to you in future years. For example, if you ever decide to sell your business and need to know which of your contracts are assignable, you’ll be easily able to check the assignment terms to see when Variations to the assignment section were made.
Indexing the other information in your standardized contracts will also allow you to easily retrieve other important information such as payment due dates, termination dates, option exercise periods, insurance requirements, and the like.
The possibilities are endless!
If you already have a template that you love, but you also want to take advantage of our negotiation tool, we can do that too. The template won’t be “standardized,” but the process will, and your business contacts will love you for it.
Just reach out to us to discuss a white-label solution for your own templates.
