This contract studio is a law firm. We help clients identify and manage legal risks in commercial contracts. We believe that how we do it is different than a traditional law firm.
Like a traditional law firm, we review, negotiate, and draft routine and bespoke commercial contracts. In addition, our experience has taught us that managing risk through contracts starts before and ends after contract signing. Lawyers can add great value in these before-and-after moments of a contract's lifecycle.
Here are some examples:
We love the language of a contract studio because we embrace the idea of contracting as a dynamic process. This also to be a place to study, experiment, and play with contracts and tools in the contracting process to improve the contracting experience for our clients.
There is space for iteration, ideation, and acknowledgement of how parties' feelings reduce or add road blocks to the contracting process.
A commercial contract is a contract for the exchange of goods or services, or both. For example, a contract between a property developer and a general contractor to construct a new housing, or an agreement between a government entity and a tech company to use the tech company's software.
Whether for bet-the-business levels of complex or routine agreements, we know that precise drafting and substantive excellence are no less important than the parties' feelings about the negotiations and their interactions with counsel. This dynamic drives our interest in applying human-centred design to law to smooth frictions between users and providers of legal services.
The client is not always the user of the work product (in our experience, the client is often not the user of the work product). For example, we might consider the in-house counsel instructing us or the business lead giving final sign-off for the transaction as the "client" - after all, that is the individual with whom we interact as external counsel. The parties interacting the most with the work product once it is created might be totally different people, such as sales team members, account managers, project managers, the client's customers.
Lots happens before and after a contract is signed. For example, before an agreement is drafted, there may be memoranda of understanding, term sheets, and risk matrices. After an agreement is inked, it might be extended, renewed, amended, terminated, or disputed. We use the term "contract lifecycle" to capture the whole spectrum of activities.