When you visit your lawyer for advice, you get customized information tailored to your situation, right? You’re paying a lot for that advice, so you would hope so.

But when you think more closely about it, how likely is it going to be that you have come to the lawyer with a problem that they have never seen before? 

Lawyers, particularly specialist lawyers, often operate inside some fairly narrow confines in the law. So when more than one person comes to a lawyer in a very similar situation, the advice they get from that lawyer may, for some parts of the overall task, be very similar to what has been provided or advised to other clients. You could say there is a ‘standard’ component to the advice, with customization for each client.

It can be helpful to think of it as a diagram. The whole of the rectangle is legal advice. But the larger part below the red line is standardized legal advice, and the smaller part is truly customized advice.

Lawyers see those parts and would likely say they provide blended advice, and it’s that blend that is the important part.

At IT Contract Templates we have looked for a way to unblend the lawyer’s advice, and provide just the standard part by way of template products. 

We looked at what problems clients were facing and asked if each case was entirely unique – or was there enough overlap to provide a standardized product, with room for minor or large variations?

We realized that, like doctors, lawyers had often seen it all – or seen most of it before, albeit in different guises. Whatever the issue, someone has probably had it previously. Where there is something ‘unique’, it is likely there are, or will be, components that other clients experience or need.

So we set about providing the standard part when it came to contracts – capturing the common elements from various areas and bundling them together. This requires a bit of a shift in thinking, approaching problems from the angle of looking for commonalities rather than addressing differences.

By providing standard products, which we make readily available and which are easy to use and understand, people are able to save time and money.

But there still needed to be room for that top part of the diagram, the customized advice. So we made sure the templates had places where they could be configured, changed, and made to fit different circumstances. This is where the support which comes as part of IT Contract Templates bundles can be the most useful – support comes as standard to assist with using the products. In addition, our template clauses can be used to address specific areas of need. 

This support is not legal advice, there’s still a time and place for legal advice – but this can be limited to the parts of your situation which are unique, and to deal with differences in the law in your jurisdiction. But then, rather than ending up with an agreement which can’t be reused, the template is available to be used all over again.