Law Department Management Blog
An excellent article in ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Dec. 2007, at 60, offers all kinds of insights into how to improve your contract processes (See my posts of Jan. 3, 2006 and Dec. 3, 2005 about my article on thirty ways to do so.). One of the co-authors, Ken Adams, hosts a blog that covers many more ideas and resources about drafting.
The article stresses the importance of templates – framework documents that guide not only the contract itself but also the how the transaction should be handled. All of us have heard about forms of contracts and collections of them, but another step is available – a style guide.
“Consider adopting. and training your personnel to use a style guide – one that doesn’t simply specify typographic conventions to follow and a few usages to avoid, but instead addresses more broadly the language and layout to be used in your templates.” They sound like a useful idea for a law department that churns out many contracts.