3 Steps for Unfamiliar Legals

You are about to launch a new business with unfamiliar legals.  Here are 3 steps that will get you to legal competence quickly.

Step 1.

Find a competent lawyer, and together with the relevant disciplines in the business (sales, commercial, ops, customer success etc) hold a workshop in which you assess all the different deal points and their trade-offs.

Step 2.

Take what you produced in Step 1, and boil it down to a set of key terms that you are willing to put in front of a customer.

Step 3.

Take what you produced in Step 2, and convert it to a long form contract. 

Depending on your preference, you can either iterate the key terms with the customer until stable and then produce a long form contract, or you can produce a standard long form contract and give that to the customer instead of the key terms from Step 2.

Here are the advantages of each step.

Step 1: makes the business fully understand the legal context, and the legal choices it is making. Step 1 makes you smarter and, because you know the ins and outs of the different permutations, a better negotiator.

Step 2: depending on the contract type (negotiated or not) and the customer type, getting agreement on key terms (ahead of the long form) saves time and money. Also, having an agreed set of key terms can also dissuade the other side’s lawyers from going off on a tangent.

Step 3: You’ve got a better long form. It’s focussed on the issues that count, and minimises legal bloat.

8 July 2025