Ep 02 A contract is not a bit of paper
Do you have an EXTRAordinary skill set?
On this episode of the Checklist Legal Podcast, we’ll go through:
• What a contract is and what it could be
• Who is a contract for? Who is the user of a contract?
• Why your ordinary laywering skills are not enough anymore and why you need an extraordinary skill set
• What does it mean to think digitally?
• How does digital thinking apply to building a contract?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
We need to stop seeing a contract as a bit of paper. It’s not a bit of paper. A contract is ultimately a map to guide a relationship between people.
Contracts involve people and processes (not just paper and clauses), it is critically important you understand both.
As you listen to the next few episodes of the Checklist Legal Podcast and start considering re-working your contracts, remember to keep thinking digitally.
Think of your audience. Think of who uses your contracts. Think about ways your digital contract can best serve its users in a digital world and provide a guidepost for them in the contract relationship.
Once you start thinking digitally, your productivity naturally increases as you notice unnecessary things, process, and tasks and start to get rid of them.
Take the time to learn new digital skills and think about your work in the digital context – build an EXTRAordinary skillset.
Remember that thinking digitally and digitisation is ‘…less as a thing [in itself] and more a way of doing things.’
A contract is a digital tool with the power to enhance your personal and professional productivity. Start exploring what it means for a contract to be a contract in our digital world.
ACTIONABLE CHALLENGE
Start keeping an Evernote note or Nozbe list or even a memo note in your phone of all the unnecessary steps you start to think about or see in relation to the contracts you come across. You can refine this list later into a list of ‘things to fix’ when you are reviewing contracts. You could also start a list of questions to ask your colleagues or clients about why a process or approval is done that (unproductive) way.
Tweet me your lists @checklistlegal, I’d love to hear what you find.
LINKS
Here are links to sources from this episode of the
and background information:
A4 vs Letter paper sizes: For an in-depth look (and I mean in-depth!) at the differences between the A4 paper size and the Letter paper size, read betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/ by Brian Forte.
Organisational digital skill building: For an excellent overview on building digital skills in an organisation, complete with great visuals on different approaches, see Delloite’s ‘Building your digital DNA: Lessons from digital leaders’, www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/Technology/gx-technology-building-your-digital-dna.pdf, accessed 27 May 2017.
Books and articles mentioned or researched:
E Brynjolfsson and A McAfee, ‘The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies’ (January 2016)
K Dorner and D Edelman, ‘What digital really means’ (27 February 2016) retrieved from digitaldonewrite.com/2016/02/27/what-digital-really-means/.
H Haapio, and DA Plewe, and R deRooy, ‘Contract Continuum: From Text to Images, Comics, and Code’ (February 23, 2017) Retrieved via papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2928604, accessed 10 June 2017.
Music: Silent Partner, ‘Sway this way
The eBook by Verity White, Secrets of Productive Contracts
Head to the Checklist Boutique, Checklist Legal’s very own digital store full of templates, resources and Create Contracts Clients Love.
