Legal

For clarity’s sake, keep contracts simple

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Comments

  1. May be it is the Legal experts objective to design to ensure Clients or their Professionals are not able to understand the legal and financial implications of the drafted terms and conditions and thus will be dependent on them and thus ensure continued for fees for them.
    Clients and their Professionals may also not make necessary inquiries or see clarifications on aspects they may not understand due possibly to arrogance or to hide their own ignorance or possible collusion.
    Only solution could be for Clients to insist simplicity and for their Professionals and Int Auditors to enhance their own expertise.

  2. Globally we are working on construction projects on different types of contracts in limited time with so many variations it is impracticable to stick to complicated situations. The contract has to be simple.

  3. Is this not why we have standard forms of contract and standard specifications? But of course whoever uses those when lawyers and consultants have to justify their fees and prove how clever they are by re-writing everything.

  4. I agree with Abdul and Gursharan that simplicity is part of what makes a contact clear. It is a goal worth striving for if it helps the parties know what they need to achieve. However the reality of standard forms, Paul, is that they are rarely designed with simplicity as their aim, and once the lawyers amend them and the technical teams add their data, the overall complexity and ambiguity increases. Contracts are tools not just to help parties enforce rights if the project goes off course but to steer the project in the right direction. That means the users need to understand what they’re doing, not rely on legal experts.

  5. The whole article can be summarised in Sarah’s last sentence. We wish the BS didn’t exist, but it does and we’re stuck with it and there is nothing that can be done about it.

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