Ep02 A contract is not a bit of paper Checklist Legal Podcast with Verity White

Checklist Legal Podcast with Verity White

Episode 02 - A contract is not a bit of paper. MINDSET: THINK DIGITALLY This episode covers… • What a contract is • Who is a contract for? Who is the user of a contract? • Why your ordinary lawyering skills are not enough anymore and why you need an extraordinary skill set • What does it mean to think digitally? • How does digital thinking apply to building a contract KEY TAKEAWAYS • We need to stop seeing a contract as a bit of paper. It’s not a bit of paper. A contract is ultimately a map to guide a relationship between people. • Contracts involve people and processes (not just paper and clauses), SO it is critically important you must understand both. • As you listen to the next few episodes and start considering re-working contracts, remember to keep thinking digitally. Think of your audience. Think of who uses your contracts. • Think about ways your digital contract can best serve its users in a digital world and provide a guidepost for them in the contract relationship. • Once you start thinking digitally, your productivity naturally increases as you notice unnecessary things, process, and tasks and start to get rid of them. • Take the time to learn new digital skills and think about your work in the digital context – build an EXTRAordinary skillset. • Remember that thinking digitally and digitasation is ‘…less as a thing [in itself] and more a way of doing things.’ A contract is a digital tool with the power to enhance your personal and professional productivity. Start exploring what it means for a contract to be a contract in our digital world. ACTIONABLE CHALLENGE Start keeping an Evernote or Nozbe or memo note in your phone of the unnecessary steps you start to think about or see in relation to the contracts you come across. This list could later be refined into a list of ‘things to fix’ when you are reviewing contracts… or perhaps a list of questions to ask your colleagues or clients about why is it done that way. LINKS Here are links to sources from this episode of the Checklist Legal Podcast and background information: • A4 vs Letter paper sizes: For an in-depth look (and I mean in-depth!) at the differences between the A4 paper size and the Letter paper size, read betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/ by Brian Forte. • Organisational digital skill building: For an excellent overview on building digital skills in an organisation, complete with great visuals on different approaches, see Delloite’s ‘Building your digital DNA: Lessons from digital leaders’, www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/Technology/gx-technology-building-your-digital-dna.pdf, accessed 27 May 2017. Books and articles mentioned or researched: • E Brynjolfsson and A McAfee, ‘The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies’ (January 2016) • K Dorner and D Edelman, ‘What digital really means’ (27 February 2016) retrieved from digitaldonewrite.com/2016/02/27/what-digital-really-means/. • H Haapio, and DA Plewe, and R deRooy, ‘Contract Continuum: From Text to Images, Comics, and Code’ (February 23, 2017) Retrieved via papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2928604, accessed 10 June 2017. • Music: Silent Partner, ‘Sway this way' • The eBook, Secrets of Productive Contracts: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07196L4L7 Head to https://www.checklistlegal.com/podcast for show notes, resources links, and templates.