How Too Many Legal Contracts Are Costing Business

by Charles H. Green on Monday, June 23, 2008 (post #308)

What do work-for-hire contracts, email disclaimers and spam have in common? They are all getting ubiquitous, annoying—and ineffective.

Here's what I mean.

Trend #1: Business is moving from a vertical management model to a horizontal purchasing model. Consider benefits administration: once a department reporting to the VP HR, now a purchased service, linked to the company by a commercial contract for services.

The Result: more contracts.

Trend #2: Communications and media—like books, records, movies and letters—have been fragmented, even atomized. In their place: email, twitter, web sites, links, sampling, and digitization. Far more opportunities for claims of intellectual property rights.

The Result: more contracts.

Contracts and Costs

Think of contracts as transaction costs. Unlike production costs, contracts add zero value. They are a tax on productivity—necessary for orderliness in a complex society, but a form of overhead nonetheless.

Here’s the problem. Costs of production go down with scale. Transaction costs, however, go up. Often exponentially.

The more commercial contracts, the more detailed the lawyers will want to make those contracts. The more fragmented the bits of sample music are, the more detailed must the IP contracts become to cover all eventualities.

The old response to risk was to create tighter contracts. But as the world becomes more complex, the ever-fertile legal mind will find more and more risk to be mitigated—and will unfortunately default to the only thing it knows—more and more complex contracts.

When quantity of contracts demanded is multiplied by some exponential complexity factor, you’ve got a serious economic issue. It’s hard to nail down the macro-economic costs of complexity, but they are very real. See, for example, Steven Covey’s Speed of Trust or Collaboration Rules by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf.

Still, you can get a visceral example of it by looking at email disclaimers. Spudart offers a tour of 50-plus samples—Great Moments in Email Disclaimers, so to speak—for your reading pleasure.

Or harken back to BusinessWeek's legal advice to small business owners to use the fine print on sales receipts to protect companies from their customers.

And the Law Offices of Ernest Sasso gives you the downward spiral of logic that leads lawyers to attach such disclaimers to their own email; you can see the slippery slope by which every email by everyone to anyone should—in theory—have disclaimers attached.

It is, of course, ironic that disclaimers usually say "don’t read this if it wasn’t meant for you." Too bad they come at the end, after you’ve read the email.

More significant are increasing clauses in commercial contracts. Five years ago, I wasn’t being asked to certify that my subcontractors on a $50,000 consulting job had automobile insurance. I don’t recall being asked to indemnify huge clients against potential suits by third parties for theft of intellectual property. I don’t recall the ubiquity of IP suits I’m hearing about now.

Only Luddites object to increasing complexity. But only troglodytes insist on pushing the same old tools in changed circumstances, not noticing that the tools are making things worse, rather than better.

Interestingly, parties to contracts are beginning to push back in their own way—through the use of constructive hypocrisy. “Sorry about this, the lawyers are requiring it…you know, this won’t ever really come up…it's just a technicality, if we ever need to address it we've always worked it out before...come on, this doesn’t really have to change things…”

Constructive hypocrisy is often quite preferable to actually trying to live by this contractual spam. Unfortunately, many people insist on actually meaning it. And enforcing it, if only for power plays. And it doesn't take too many to force the rest to live by it.

Is there an alternative? You betcha. It’s called more trust.

If you think that’s fluffy, read about how one buyer bought an $800 million business in 20 minutes in this Wall Street Journal article.

The buyer? Warren Buffett.

Over 12,000 people have taken our Trust Quotient quiz. Check out the NEW VERSION and learn your Trust Temperament.

Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/

You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

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posted in Trust in Leadership Development and Strategy, Trust-based Selling