In-House Counsel

A contracts expert disagrees with the notion that free, online contracts will amount to much

By Rees Morrison

Ken Adams, who knows all there is to know about contracts and agreements, doesn?t think that my projection about contracts available for free online is, well, presciently drafted.

Ken writes on his blog, Adams Drafting,?YourFreeLegalForms.com is another docstoc. [Click here for his November 2007 post that criticize an early release of docstoc.] . The problem isn?t a shortage of free legal forms online. Instead, it?s that there?s available online for free a vast and ever-growing supply of contract models, most of them crappy, and separating what?s OK, in terms of language and substance, from what?s not OK is a gruesome task. Free online forms are hardly a panacea.

Furthermore, if I ever need to consult examples of a given kind of business contract, I?m going to go to the motherlode, the SEC?s EDGAR system. [Ken cites two of his previous posts]. By comparison, YourFreeLegalForms offers a puny assortment, and I wouldn?t bet on its getting much more plausible over time.?

Point taken, and thanks, Ken. The quality of the agreements available online may well be generally pretty low, but as one commenter noted on Ken?s blog, sometimes you want an Armani suit, sometimes Salvation Army will do. Maybe I should have written that the writing is on the Internet wall, but it may take a long time for the writing to be legible, let alone eloquent.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on January 22, 2009 (boomark / email).