Clause Play Episode 02: My Legal Service Conditions Old v New Walkthrough
Welcome to episode two of our Cause Play series, where our Founder & Chief Contract Enthusiasts, Verity White talks about different legal documents and how we, as legal professionals can improve them.
Join Verity this week as she walks through her own updated Checklist Legal Service Conditions, comparing the 2022 and 2020 documents.
Watch Clause Play Episode 02: My Legal Service Conditions Old v New Walkthrough
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Clause Play, where I take you through something to do with contracts and just some different ways for you to start playing with your contracts in your business or for your clients.
So today I'm taking you on an exciting, hopefully, journey through my own legal service documents, and I wanted to do a little bit of a compare and contrast approach to my current version, which I've just updated in the last few months. That's this one here compared to my previous version, which was from around 2020.
So this one on my right on the left here, this one that I'm pointing out did get the WriteMark, Plain Language certification seal of approval as the first Australian law firm to get that particular plain language certification. And you can see this one, my most recent one has the Better Contract Design Mark there from the World Commerce and Contracting, Better Contract Design review board. We were the first law firm in the world to get that mark for my legal engagement documents.
So why did I update my documents? What's the difference? And kind of what does it all make? Let's talk about that. To start with, you can say that I actually updated my logo. So this logo was I actually really loved it, but I've got this new one, which is kind of got a bit more of that hand drawn type approach that I really love using icons and graphics. This idea that you can put some handcrafted-ness into your legal documents and into your business because it's you know, it's your business, I think. I think it can be handcrafted, whether you're a law firm, a professional services firm or a creative business. There's lots to be said for getting that your creativity into your documents.
Some of the other things that you can probably notice straight away, this front page here has a lot more graphics on it than my old version.
I really wanted to explore different ways of chunking up the documents. Previously, I kind of had this quite small graphic that explained the different sections in the document. I've done that again with my service conditions here, but the approach that I wanted to take was to have our agreement and just set out that this is a part of a digital service offering, so I set up a really clear scope to start with.
I wanted to try and chunk up the documents so that people could understand. Here's where some of the parts of the agreement are. He is where some other parts are. And here's the other parts. Now, this isn't groundbreaking. Lots of different law firms and different businesses have a tiered approach to their contract terms. What I've also done is use this as my precedents clause.
So which document takes priority if there's a conflict? And so it's just a nice way to welcome people to the document. Try and explain that this is where they are and this is how things work, and also incorporate some lovely icons to set the same for the rest of the document. Now additionally, I don't know if I've done this amazingly, it is still a work in progress, so I'm always open to ideas from anyone else.
What I've also done here is set up the chunks of the documents so that that way within this document, there's different sections.
So I've been updating that to make sure that all the hyperlinks are working. The touchstone is also something new. I've done conscious contracting training this year and it was really important for me to start to really get my touchstone into my contracts with my clients. So a touchstone is basically a way of showing your vision, mission and values and the approach that you're taking to your life, your business, and to try and use that as a lens to really focus on the relationship that you're building.
And so this is how I want my relationships with my clients to set off on that strong footing. But also if people like I don't agree with Verity’s touchstone or with the Checklist Legal ethos. That's perfect. They shouldn't work with us right? So they should go, oh, they are welcome to go elsewhere. But it's the way of saying, well, this is how we work and this is what we believe in.
Now, this for me is a work in progress as well. I am always trying to better communicate the vision that I say how contracts can impact the world, how we help women in business in law, and how we help our clients. And how does that change what we wanted to see in the world? So this will probably be updated in the coming months as well.
Just as I reflect more and more on all of the learnings from 2022. And so even in the space of what is like six or eight months, my thinking on this has evolved, which is good, which is what it should do. Also, getting values into contracts I think is really important, especially if you're a purpose based business.
Now, I don't think I had my values… No, I didn't. So I didn't have my values in my original contracts, my original legal service terms that were part of the process and the onboarding process. But what I really wanted to do was have them in you know, it's part of the touchstone. It's really important to me to put those values front and center and clients.
You are encouraged to call me out. If you are saying, Verity, you are not meeting up with your values around consistency or simplicity. We think we can do better. So I really it's potentially a bit scary if you're putting your values into your contracts and you're a bit worried about it. But I guess that is a question for you and for your organization.
If you are a values based business, then your contracts, I think, should also be values based. So again, these will change because I've evolving, you know, these values have been the check, this legal values for the past two years from when I was a sole practitioner, now having a teeny tiny team and just the approach that I'm taking as I reflect on the law firm and who we want to be.
And so these will be updated as well. But I've also got here and it's kind of chunked in at the end client experience and I think these will probably stay the same. But client experience is the other lens that we want our clients to imagine. You know, start to think about the way that we're delivering services. And these are the words that we want to hear at the end of some of the testimonials that we receive.
We really want people to feel confident and energized, understood, delighted and a little bit rebellious. So that's kind of our approach to it. And so that document, that page is at Touchstone and that is hopefully distilling what the law firm is and our brand promise in a way in maybe a too wordy page. But we'll see what we could do if I get some professional copywriting help to bedazzle that a little bit.
So then this is where the document is not that dissimilar from the existing one, from the previous one where I do go into our relationship with you. So the headings are still the same from a design perspective. I did want to bring in more of those icons. I don't know if it helps that much. It's still very text heavy.
I could probably do a lot more to break up some of that text, and when I do a walk through on my first ever employment agreement, I'll show you how I added more visuals into that document. But for now, this is kind of what I'm working with, so always room for improvements. Previously I had this belief in plain language circles that headings should be descriptive so often, and that's what you'll see on this side a bit more than perhaps this side where headings get quite long.
And so instead of saying things like money or fees and payments, it might say, You agree to pay us money. And so I think in some ways that makes things harder to scan and read and understand because I think and this is something I need to do testing on that people read through and they see money and they're like, okay, the money section, that's the bit that I'm interested in as opposed to trying to read through like ten FAQs and try and find it.
So that's something that I've or that I also updated from my earlier version to the later version, as well as things you can see like the chunked up heading section is different using that pale blue on with black. And that goes back to accessibility. This approach I did quite like previous because of the colour of my grain. I needed to use this quite dark grain for accessibility here.
I've used more of that teal grain but gone darker than my actual brand colours. So that way it works for me. An accessibility point of view, it's probably still a little bit too light. You can see here the dark does jump out a bit more, but I was trying to get away from the dark green law firm.
You'll also see that the text is a lot smaller, so maybe it's a bit too crammed in. So that's another thing to think about as well. So our relationship with you, where do I go now? Scope of legal services. So again, something else that I like doing is starting each section on a new page.
You can obviously do that whenever you want to. It does mean your document ends up getting longer in some instances unless you've got a magic document and everything just works on one page because naturally some sections are longer than others. So whether or not that's something that you're working with, if you've got a long if you've got a document that's quite technical and it is that chunks gives it that extra room to breathe, I would definitely say break it up.
I think it's really nice if you can have new sections starting at the top of a new page, it just makes it easy to look for, easy to find. Whereas here, because we're trying to save on page length so that 's six pages and this one's actually nine pages. So saving on pages here, remembering there's no touchstone page as well.
There's a few other things going on in each document. Yeah. So I've clarified things a little bit more around the project brief because I really like to have a scope that's quite clear, almost like a statement of work that's up the front. And that's my project brief for legal services.
Then these legal service conditions sit at the back. I wanted to clarify that a little bit more, just kind of double check that project brief. That's where the key details are, and that part is quite automated in my client management system, so that's really easy for me to set up with the old version, it was a similar approach.
But I think whether or not I did anyway, I'm just I think I just wanted to clarify it a bit more here. Pay on time. Always nice protecting your information. So I beefed up. I feel like there was quite a bit of a difference on protecting information. Maybe I didn't go into it as much and I felt like I wanted to really dove into that a bit more. So, that's why that information intellectual property section is much longer.
And this is the other section that's new based on conscious contracting. I don't know that I even have a dispute resolution clause in this one. Maybe not. Anyway, So what I wanted to do for my conscious contracting kind of approach to life in law was to have what's called a dynamic, what I call a dynamic change section, which in the world of conscious contracting is called addressing change and embracing disagreement. I just call it dynamic change because it's all about knowing what, you know, what things will likely change. This deep dive is a process that I've set up with my independent contractor agreements. It's in my employment agreements, it's with my clients. So that way there is a tool there for clients to say, “hey, can we have a chat? I've got a bit of a curly issue”, and the idea is to talk about it sooner rather than later.
Now again, this is quite text heavy. I've tried to call it out and chunk it up into the steps. I would love to turn this into more of an infographic approach. As you would know, these things do take time to do and sit down and work out.
Ideally, I would like to work with my clients, some of my wonderful repeat clients that I work with and say, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And that way it is more of that collaborative approach to contracting so that I'm getting that stakeholder feedback, which, you know, aligns with the B Corp status as well of the law firm.
But then again, we do have that, that there's the termination clause and good old better contract design mark at the end. So you know, comparing the two in terms of comparing the two, the page count is longer for my new document. I think it's clearer in lots of ways the fonts and things I've slightly tweaked, but a lot of it's still the same around still that intention to be clear, and the hope that it's fair and balanced and that clients feel comfortable.
I want them to trust me with their business. And so that's why I hope that and it's also me trying to show that this is the kind of love that your contracts will get when you trust me to help with your business or with your law firm documents. That's one of the reasons why I think contracts are so amazing.
They can do a lot of extra talking for you. And I really do say my service conditions, my legal documents as an extra team member who helps kind of get things done in the business and, you know, builds that really good relationship that I want to have with my clients over a long term.
There you go, What do you think about these two documents?
Do you prefer one or the other?
Do you think the touchstone is silly?
Would you like to have one in your contracts?
Let me know what you think.
I'm really interested to hear your thoughts or see your legal service agreements. It's always a work in progress. So I'll be looking forward to the New Year, probably showing you the next iteration of my service conditions as I continue to play with them over time.
This has been Clause Play, so thank you for coming along and let me just get that going one more time because we want to see it again. Clause Play. Thanks for joining and let me know your thoughts. Bye for now!
If you’ve got ideas on any clause that you would like us to play with or any particular company’s contract that you’d like to see us have a little get our little mitts into reach out via @checklistlegal on Instagram, Linkedin or comment below.
