Whilst we respect the concept of a written agreement it seems that a legally written contract is designed very much to discourage other parties to read them.

We are currently creating a distribution agreement for Plug and Save.  Whilst we know exactly what we want to include, the template, created for us by lawyers is unecessarily pompous, confusing and suprisingly ambiguous.

Much of our overseas business entails working with non-native English speakers.  It seems somewhat disrespectful to provide confusing and lengthy legalese to such companies, knowing that they’ll likely not understand the complex wording.  This gives us an unfair advantage and we’ve resolved to translate much of the default terms to something a little clearer.  To us, these documents are intimidating and don’t instill much confidence of a fair trading agreement.

Whichever lawyer chose to phrase this paragraph deserves to be shot …

"The individual contracts for the sale of Products formed by Distributor’s submission of orders to Company pursuant to the terms and conditions hereof shall automatically incorporate, to the extent applicable, the terms and conditions hereof, shall be subject only to those terms and conditions (together with all terms in orders which are contemplated by this Agreement) and shall not be subject to any conflicting or additional terms included in any documents exchanged in connection therewith."

We have replaced it with …

"This contract takes authority over any other agreements made, unless specifically agreed upon in writing by both Company and Distributor."
 

… if only contracts were designed to show how one company wishes to demonstrate that it’s created a fair and respectful contract then we’d have no need for the pompous and verbose contracts that seem so common.