Law firm Source Legal has recently launched the first online portal for single-page business contract creation in Australia.
The portal, aptly named “One Page Contracts”, provides 10 free one-page templates for popular contracts, all written in plain English. It includes contracts for employing staff or contractors, maintaining confidentiality, supplying and procuring products and licensing intellectual property.
Anyone can download the templates and use them to create tailor-made contracts within minutes, saving businesses time and money usually spent for preparing such contracts.
“This portal takes the lawyers out of contracts,” says Source Legal’s founding director Stanislav Roth. “We have pared back ten of the most commonly used contracts to the essentials in order to enable businesses, especially small businesses and start-ups, to use them with ease and confidence. Although they are short, they are robust, thought-through and designed to cover all key issues.”
Roth said that contracts are a fundamental safeguard for businesses wanting to minimise risk and maximise certainty. But too often businesses, particularly small and medium enterprises and start-ups, don’t have the funds or skills to draft their own contracts, he explained. In the case of supply of goods and services, having a simple but effective contract in place can save both parties to any transaction from misunderstanding, and worse, bad debt or even litigation.
Typically, Roth said that this type of contract runs to dozens of pages in length, involving lawyers on both sides. Source Legal’s contracts are shorter but as comprehensive as possible.
“Our one-page supply of goods and provision of services templates provide most businesses with as much certainty as their 20- or 30-page counterpart, but without the expense,” said Roth. “All too often lawyers are the only beneficiaries of long, unwieldy contracts, adding clauses that are of little benefit to the contractual parties.”
