Jusletter IT

Making Contracts Work for Clients: towardS Greater Clarity and Usability

  • Autor/Autorin: Helena Haapio
  • Kategorie: Kurzbeiträge
  • Region: Finnland
  • Rechtsgebiete: Rechtsvisualisierung
  • Sammlung: Tagungsband IRIS 2012
  • Zitiervorschlag: Helena Haapio, Making Contracts Work for Clients: towardS Greater Clarity and Usability, in: Jusletter IT 29. Februar 2012
While some contracts may need to work as evidence in court, most contracts do not. Instead, they need to work for the parties so they get the results they want to accomplish. Yet this is not what guides most of today’s contract design. Water-tight, legally “perfect” contracts that seek to allocate all risk to the other party may not work as intended. Such contracts are not easy to read, comprehend, or implement. If not implemented correctly, business and legal problems will follow. The time has come for contract drafters to focus on the usability of their work products, not just as legal tools but also as business tools. Both consumer contracts and commercial contracts should be communicated in more user-friendly ways, and they can. After introducing some of the challenges, this paper presents work in progress aimed at overcoming them by developing new methods to improve the clarity and usability of contracts. It proposes information design and visualisation – adding tables, charts, and images to supplement text – as promising new ways that can help in this venture.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

  • 1. Introduction: Seeing Contracts and Contract Users in a New Light
  • 1.1. The Users of Commercial Contracts
  • 1.2. Perfect, Complex Contracts – or Good Enough, Usable Contracts?
  • 1.3. From a Reactive to a Proactive Approach
  • 1.4. Information Design: Plain Language and Beyond
  • 2. Experiments: Communicating Contracts in New, More User-friendly Ways
  • 2.1. Early Experiments with Contract Visualisation
  • 3. Making Contracts Work for Clients
  • 4. References
  • 4.1. Acknowledgements

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