Legal design in commercial contracting and business sustainability New legal quality metrics standards

Abstract

There is surely room for improvement in commercial contracting practice. The current contracting evolution often leads to a situation where contracts become increasingly and may be needlessly, complex. The paper discusses how complex contracts evolve and how the proposed legal design approach can bring comprehensibility for tackling complexity in contracting. This approach is providing for various benefits and incentives, such as business sustainability, reduced transaction costs, and competitive business advantage. A novel legal quality metric is introduced. This metric will foster the measuring of quality in the legal profession. The metric, comprehensibility, would better serve both lawyers and clients in measuring the true quality of legal services, processes, and products – than the often used, easily misleading metrics such as time spent, cases won, and hours billed. Through this innovative approach to legal quality metrics, the paper will bring further understanding of the impact of comprehensibility in commercial contracting.