While Burton led the legal team for the division`s new digital services unit, he and his colleagues noticed that contract negotiations with clients dragged on for months, hampering growth. So they set out to replace the unit`s seven horribly complicated contracts with one that even a high school student could understand. In this article, Burton describes how the team achieved this goal and what lessons learned along the way. He also shares the results: customers were enthusiastic about the new contract, some even signed it without a single change. The time it takes to negotiate contracts has dropped by 60%. And now, contracts are starting to spread within GE in plain language. The legal team then asked external law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges to review the contract. The firm has assembled a team of lawyers with expertise in a wide range of areas, including commercial contracts, intellectual property, litigation and alternative dispute resolution. The exam lasted about three weeks and Weil always proved to be a great partner. To ensure that the final contract adequately protected GE`s interests, the Weil team regularly challenged our in-house legal team. The concept of contracts in plain language and their benefits are hard to deny. Every company wants legal agreements that are easy to understand.
Every company wants to spend less time negotiating and more time satisfying the customer. Every company wants to spend less time managing contracts and more time innovating. But change in any business is difficult, and radical change – which it is – is damn impossible. Creating a solid model for contracts in plain language takes time, consumes resources, and puts intellectual pressure on your organization given the habits that have developed over the years. Without a little old-fashioned courage and perseverance, your initiative in plain language will fail. There is legal terminology that has a broader or very broad meaning or that narrows or replaces itself depending on the circumstances in which it has been applied. marriage, for example; There is a 30-day residency specification, which means that the bride or groom must live in India for at least 30 days before applying to the local registry office to get married. divorce, for example; A person may need to file for divorce as a resident of India if they have lived there for a period of 6 months to 1 year. If an arbitrator determines that this Agreement has been breached and losses have been suffered as a result of such breach, the breaching party will indemnify the non-violating party for such losses or provide the remedies set forth in Section 8 for breach of Section 8. LawSikho has created a telegram group for the exchange of legal knowledge, recommendations and various possibilities. You can click on this link and register: I hope our story will convince you of the benefits of moving to treaties in plain language. For those who choose to do so, here are some key lessons we`ve learned: As part of GE Aviation`s Digital Services unit`s plaintext initiative, a contract`s limitation of liability clause has been significantly simplified: those words and phrases that might be foreign to some or completely alien to others that fall into the category of ordinary men.
Given this factor, it is clear that this vocabulary is quite normal for all lawyers and judges. Every lawyer should be particularly aware of the meaning and definition of these words and phrases. It is very important to know the exact meaning and definition of the words used, as it is one of the most important and important factors required to become a competent and skillful lawyer. It is not only that vocabulary, idioms, syntax and sentences are important, but also the lawyer who drafts such legal documents is obliged to know the legal use of words, as well as the punctuation marks that make his client`s legal document clear without any kind of ignorance and disorientation. In law, there are well-known words that, when used legally, have clearly opposite meanings. Like what; in non-legal situations, “STAY” is usually synonymous with “REMAIN”, but in courtroom vocabulary, the word “STAY” is often referred to as “POSTPONEMENT OR STAY OF COURT PROCEEDINGS”. Similarly, in legal terms, “CONSIDERATION” means “A PRICE THAT THE PROMISOR AGREES TO PAY TO THE PROMISOR”, but the non-legal meaning of the term “CONSIDERATION” is “REFLECTION”. Learning to write like a lawyer was harder than expected.