Avoid overly complicated contracts with these tips.

Everyone likes a nice, clear contract. Historically legal contracts have been long, boring affairs with questionable grammar and formatting. However, there has definitely been a shift towards more modern and user friendly contracts over the past few years - and why wouldn’t you want to make your contracts really easy to read and understand?

There are lots of issues that come from making your contracts unnecessarily long and complex. A major concern is losing the message you are trying to convey and ending up in a dispute with the other party about what the clause means. Then your legal spend increases massively and you end up losing a load of management time trying to sort an issue which could have been avoided with clear drafting. Not ideal.

So here are a few simple legal writing tricks you can use to make them more effective and easy to understand.

1. Choose shorter words over complex, multi-syllable words.
   ❌ Requirements
   ✔ Needs
   

2. Strip out wordy phrases which add nothing.
   ❌ In order to
   ✔ To
   

3. Move from passive to active.
   ❌The lunch shall be delivered by Jenny.
   ✔Jenny shall deliver the lunch.

4. Avoid subordinate clauses if you can.
   ❌Jenny shall, except where Tim is not hungry, make lunch for Tim.
    ✔Jenny shall make Tim lunch, unless he is not hungry.

5. Get to the point as quickly as you can.
   ❌ On a daily basis, Jenny shall make Tim lunch.
    ✔Jenny shall make Tim lunch daily.
   

   There are lots of other ways to make your contracts more reader-friendly and I'll share more tips soon.
   
   Now off to grab some food as I'm clearly still hungry...!