Here’s an example. A company that I was working with was using an employment contract template provided by a large law firm. The contract was about 15 pages long. Scattered throughout its length were a number of variables that had to be filled in by hand: salary, job title, days’ holiday, pension contribution, probation period etc. Inevitably the contracts would get signed with one or two of the variables left empty and, at some time in the future, the missing variable would become an issue and resolving them would take hours of HRs’ and the employee’s time.
The fix? Move all the variables to the front of the contract and put them in a table. That way they are visible to everyone and impossible to miss. The end result: less effort at the time, less aggravation down the line, less cost all round.
OK, so it’s not the world’s most stunning example of wasted cost, but it highlights an important point. It’s not enough for legal stuff to work from a legal point of view, it must also work in the real world. Legal stuff which isn’t adapted to its context will always cause problems.