How to draft a contract: legal agreements made simple

Contracts, in one form or another, have been around for centuries. There were few written contracts in earlier times, and people made deals with a simple handshake. While verbal agreements still apply in certain situations, most businesses put their contracts in writing for one simple reason: If (when) something goes wrong, a written contract can protect both parties in a court of law.

What is a contract?

A contract is a legally enforceable agreement between at least two parties who wish to exchange something of value. While all contracts are agreements, not all agreements are contracts.

Agreements only become contracts if they give rise to a legal obligation, include some form of consideration, and involve freely consenting parties who are competent to contract. Examples of agreements that are not considered contracts include terms and conditions agreements, privacy policies, and gentlemen’s agreements. Read more about agreement vs contract.

How to write a contract

Contracts must of course contain all the requisite elements of a contract that make it legally binding on the parties agreeing it. But there's more to contracts than just getting the legal basics in place. In fact, contract authoring is as much about the way a contract is written as it is about the terms it contains.

When contracts are vague and hard to understand, parties may be reluctant to sign them, and the process often slows to a crawl. That's a problem for any company, because contracts are critical to commerce. For a company to become and remain profitable, it’s essential to keep contracts moving forward, and make them easy to sign. Here are some ways to take the friction out of contracts:

• Increase processing fluency. If a contract makes sense and is easy to process, people are more likely to trust what it says and agree to its terms.
• Determine your overall strategy. To reach an agreement as quickly as possible, you should examine the history of negotiation, determine the terms you are typically willing to concede, and soften those to remove potential friction to speed up signing.
• Include the critical information upfront. Instead of burying essential clauses in the middle of a contract, put the good stuff at the front or in a schedule at the end. Why force the other parties to hunt through the document to find the information you know is most important to them? Making these terms easier to find often improves the chance of contract compliance, so don't hide them!
• Be as brief as possible. When was the last time you read a long contract through to the end? Extremely lengthy contracts are often skimmed over and not fully understood by the parties involved. To get your contracts read, you need to say as much as you can in the least number of words in plain English with no repetition.
• Consider your audience. Many contracts are not especially reader-friendly. To be more palatable, agreements need to focus on the purpose of the contract and make it easier for all parties to obtain their desired outcome.
• Benchmark your process. Rather than automating an inefficient process, do some benchmarking by focusing on plain language and readability to speed up your contract lifecycle and negotiation time. When you’re ready to automate contracts, your process will be more efficient for everyone involved.

Assuming that what the contract is selling is something of value and someone is willing to buy it, it should always be possible to write a contract that allows each party to achieve its objectives.

Create your own contract

If you are wondering how to create a legally-binding contract, then you have come to the right place. There are many ways to create a contract - and here we're talking about the document creation process itself, rather than the words contained in the document. Many people choose to do it in Microsoft Word - and why not? Over one billion devices worldwide can run Microsoft Word, and the platform ‘hosts’ most of the contracts currently in existence at one point or another.

There’s just one problem: Microsoft built Word to be an all-purpose word processing tool, not contract drafting software. Contracts created in Word are usually made by copying and pasting from existing Word documents or templates completed manually. This process often leads to deviations from the initial terms, misunderstandings between the parties, and negative consequences for everyone - particularly when trying to wrestled with version control.

However, there is a better option – automation. The Juro platform offers an in-browser template editor custom-built for contracts. Our solution brings together contract text, integrations, native eSignature, and a dynamic repository formed on a flexible data layer, allowing you to query your data at any time during the contract lifecycle, removing information silos across teams.

There are three ways to create a contract in Juro. You can:

1. write one from scratch;
2. drag and drop an existing PDF into the Juro platform; or
3. create a template and automate the workflow – our suggested method.

Juro's contract editor lets you create beautiful, legally robust documents from templates in seconds. Hit the button below to find out more and try it.

We'll explain the process on how to create a legal contract in Juro more thoroughly in a moment, but first, let's take a quick look at the general process of creating a contract using a template.

The contract template process

With a contract automation platform like Juro’s, users can automatically generate contracts by following the steps below:

• Create a dynamic template. An attractive contract template with engaging branding can mean the difference between a strong business relationship and a poor outcome.
• Build and send self-serve contracts. Teams use a Q&A flow to enter contract data – names, addresses, and dates – into smart fields. Metadata will automatically populate a searchable contract, making it easier to track obligations later down the line and perform contract audits with ease.
• Streamline the approval workflow. With Juro, stakeholders can get routine contracts approved quickly thanks to an automated workflow, dramatically speeding up the contracting process.
• Collaborate internally. Team members can collaborate with colleagues in real-time on contracts – no need to worry about audit trails and version control.
• Negotiate in-browser. Counterparties have the ability to negotiate a contract without having to move into Word and lose audit trails and data. Endless email tennis is over.
• Drop-in signing blocks. Juro’s mobile-responsive, native eSignature tool allows teams to sign contracts anywhere, at any time. In a high-growth environment, this capability eliminates backlog and will enable signatories to speed contracts through faster. Learn more about signatory authority.

Create a contract in Juro

Great. Now you know the basics of how to create contracts. But what if you are using Juro to supercharge your contract workflow and set up a contract? Creating a contract in Juro couldn't be simpler:

1. To create a new contract in your Juro workspace, click on the "+ Create contract" button on the top left of your screen under the "Contracts" tab.

2. Select the template you would like to use to create your contract, or create a new  one by clicking "New contract". If you do decide to create a contract from scratch, you will need to type in the name of the other party first.

3. Next, you will be taken to the in-browser contract editor, where you can either type or paste your contract into the blank document. From here, you can use tools to edit your text, insert tables, set up smartfields and create conditions.

4. Once you have created your contract, you should add the signatories under the "Parties" tab by typing in their emails. If necessary, you can aso add more signatories using the "+Add" button. Once your signatories have been added to the contract, you wil see a signature block appear.

5. Excellent. Now you are ready to send the contract. Simply click on the "Send for signing" button. Then you can use the default invite message or customize your own for the signatory. Once you have done this, just click "Send". Through Juro, your signatories will then be able to sign electronically - no matter where they are.

Important: please note that once a contract has been signed by at least one of the parties (aka signatories), you can no longer make edits to the contract. Instead, you will need to request a contract amendment.

6. If you chose to create a business contract using an existing template, you will be taken through the Q&A process for that template, where your answers will be used to populate the contract.

7. If you want to save your new contract as a template, simply click the "Create template" button, which can be found under "More options".

What next?

Too often, businesses make the mistake of creating contracts, getting them signed, and forgetting about them soon after, meaning they lose any valuable data that can be drawn from contracts created, and legal agreements can fall through the cracks.

Fortunately, in the age of digital contracting, this need not be the case. By creating a contract repository, your teams can collect and track your legal agreements and empower your teams to remove risk and capture more revenue. You can do this by using Juro's end-to-end contract automation platform for the most seamless tracking process.

Results that move the needle

Teams that trust their contract creation to Juro report a dramatic impact on their contract workflow:

“Up to 30 per cent of the legal function’s time is won back through not having to do low-value tasks" - Legal team, RVU

“There’s no greater ROI than the fact that by enabling our teams to self-serve, Juro reduced our need to hire a second lawyer" - Legal team, Appear Here

As these and many other organizations have found (including Deliveroo, Cazoo, Trustpilot and Babylon Health), it is much easier (not to mention accurate and efficient) to create contracts digitally. If you want to find out more about how the Juro platform will streamline your process, hit the button below to get in touch.