What do you call a dense, overly lengthy contract that’s loaded with legal jargon and virtually impossible for a non-lawyer to understand? The status quo, says Shawn Burton, the general counsel for GE Aviation’s Business & General Aviation.
When Burton was leading the legal team for that division’s new digital-services unit, he and his colleagues noticed that customer contract negotiations were dragging on for months, hampering growth. So they set out to replace the unit’s seven excruciatingly complicated contracts with one that even a high schooler could understand. In this article, Burton describes how the team went about achieving that goal and the lessons learned along the way. He also shares the results: Customers were delighted with the new contract, and some even signed it without making a single change. The time it took to negotiate contracts dropped by a whopping 60%. And now plain-language contracts are starting to spread inside GE.
Buy CopiesContracts that take forever to negotiate, are unclear to everyone but lawyers, and generate all too many disputes between parties.
Legal jargon; long-winded explanations of the reasons for transactions; pages of definitions; strings of synonyms; all-cap, italicized, bolded sections; and awkward sentences filled with semicolons.
Radically shorter “plain-language” contracts that a high schooler could understand.
What do you call a dense, overly lengthy contract that is loaded with legal jargon and virtually impossible for a nonlawyer to understand? The status quo. For the most part, the contracts used in business are long, poorly structured, and full of unnecessary and incomprehensible language.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2018 issue (pp.134–139) of Harvard Business Review.
Read more on Business writingShawn Burton is the general counsel of GE Aviation’s Business & General Aviation and Integrated Systems businesses. He was previously the general counsel for GE Aviation’s Digital and Avionics businesses.
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