How contracts became the most overengineered business tool in history
Imagine if your car’s manual was 90 percent about what to do if aliens steal your vehicle.
That’s exactly what most contracts are like.
Did you know that back in the ‘70s, the average commercial agreement was just 5 pages?!
How did we get from that, to 50+ pages of dense legalese?
Because of fear. Fear is what created this mess.
Every lawsuit meant we had to add another clause. Every new regulation created an additional paragraph. Every ambitious young lawyer who imagined an absurd “what-if” scenario added a whole new page.
And the irony is that when contractual disuptes do happen, they’re almost never about these ridiculous edge cases. They’re about the basics: price, delivery dates, termination rights.
Over the past 50 years, we’ve force-fed nonsensical “what-if” scenarios into our contracts until they’re useless for actually clarifying relationships.
Here’s my prediction:
- By 2035, contracts will be much shorter
- They will look like simple term sheets
- They will use visual diagrams
- AIs will negotiate directly with each other
Does this sound like a utopian scenario? If so, then consider that 70 percent of agreements signed in Concord right now have zero negotiation, and never get reviewed by a lawyer. That’s only going to become more common over the next 10 years.
What do you think? Are bloated contracts obsolete already? Or am I missing something here?
Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.
