It is important to maintain consistency in contract house style across templates and in the clauses used for the same purpose. There may be certain intentional differences between the contract as generated by the Weagree Wizard and the original model contract.
Consistency: contract house style #
Implementing contract automation is usually the moment to improve consistency of all contracts in the organisation, to establish contract know-how management. Things that may or should have been changed:
- Regarding a contracting parties block (and signatures block), to reinforce consistency, a structure and wording based on one of the model contract may have been adopted (and applied to the other model contracts).
- In principle, all square brackets have been removed (unless it is clear that in real life, follow-up action is required from the user).
- In principle, all footnotes, endnotes, Word ‘comments’ and inline instructions have been removed.
- Other styling may have been applied to paragraphs. For example, in an article with only one section, section numbering may have been removed (as there is not a second numbered section).
- Where numbers must appear in the contract text, an automated calculation or a number-formatting style may have been implemented.
Consistency in contract clauses (know-how management) #
Miscellaneous (boilerplate) clauses (usually in the last article) and quasi-miscellaneous clauses (e.g. confidentiality, force majeure, term and termination provisions) may be replaced by those previously inserted in relation to other templates.
This should only be done in consultation with the person responsible (if this is someone other than you), and then only where seemingly (given the type of contract and contract clause) the contract language does not aim at a different or specific wording.
Note that building a clause library is something that can be initiated at any time: moving a template’s clause into the clause library requires only two clicks.
