Templates, drafting, review and negotiation, answered
123 questions on contract templates, drafting, review, negotiation, and contract management, answered in plain English for growing businesses.
Templates, drafting, review, negotiation and contract management, answered directly, drawn from what growing businesses actually search for.
Templates: what they can and cannot do
A template is a starting structure. It is not a decision about your risk.
Templates are genuinely useful. They stop you forgetting a clause, they give you standard language for the parts nobody negotiates, and they make small deals fast. If you are choosing between an unsigned handshake and a decent template, use the template.
What a template cannot do is make the decisions. Every contract has a small number of clauses where value actually moves: liability cap and carve-outs, IP ownership, indemnities, termination rights, payment and renewal. A template fills those with a neutral default that suits neither side particularly. Whether that default is acceptable depends on your deal size, your insurance, and what you can afford to lose.
The practical middle ground is a template set that has been adjusted once, properly, for your business, plus a short playbook saying which clauses your team can change without asking and which always come to legal. That is usually a few days of work and it removes most of the ongoing legal spend that small businesses resent.
Are free contract templates safe for a small business?
For low value, low risk arrangements they are usually better than nothing. For anything where a failure could cost more than you can absorb, or where you are handling someone else’s data or money, the template default on liability and indemnity is the part to check before you sign anything.
What legal documents does a business actually need?
Most B2B service businesses need: standard terms of business, a services or subscription agreement, an NDA, a DPA if you handle personal data for clients, a privacy notice, and contractor or employment agreements. Startups add founder and share documents. Everything else is usually situational.
Where can I get contract templates in Word, PDF or Google Docs?
Plenty of commercial template libraries sell them, and some regulators and trade bodies publish free versions. The format is the least important part. What matters is whether the template was written for your jurisdiction and your type of deal, and whether anyone adjusted the risk clauses afterwards.
Can I make a legal contract without a lawyer?
Yes. A contract needs offer, acceptance, consideration, intention to create legal relations and enough certainty about the terms. Nothing requires a lawyer. The question is not whether the contract is valid, it is whether it protects you in the situations where it will actually be tested.
How do I turn a template into our standard contract?
Have one pass done properly: set your liability position, fix the IP and data clauses to match how you work, add your real payment and renewal mechanics, and delete the clauses that do not apply. Then write a one page playbook of what sales can and cannot vary. After that, most deals never need legal again.
What is a founder or funder agreement template?
A founders agreement covers equity split, vesting, roles, decision making, IP assignment into the company and what happens when someone leaves. A funding agreement covers investment terms. Templates exist for both, and both are areas where the standard template genuinely does not fit unusual arrangements, which is exactly when founders use one.
Contract drafting
Good drafting is mostly interviewing, not writing.
Contract drafting is the process of turning a commercial arrangement into terms that will still make sense to a stranger in three years. The writing is the last part. Most of the work is finding out what actually happens: who does what, when money moves, what the client thinks they are buying, what happens when the relationship ends, and which failures would genuinely hurt.
A drafting engagement usually runs: a short call to map the deal, a first draft with the assumptions flagged, one round of comments, and a final version plus a plain English note on the clauses that matter. For a standard services or SaaS agreement, that is days rather than weeks.
Cost varies by scope and by whether you are buying a bespoke document or a reusable one. A one-off bespoke agreement for a single deal is the expensive way to buy contracts. A reusable set with a playbook costs more up front and less every month afterwards.
What is contract drafting?
Writing the terms of an agreement so they are clear, enforceable and match what the parties actually intend. It includes structuring the document, defining the commercial mechanics, allocating risk, and making sure the contract works at the end of the relationship as well as the start.
How much do contract drafting services cost?
It depends on complexity and whether you want a bespoke document or a template set. Fixed fee is common for standard agreements and is worth asking for. The more useful question is what you get: a single document, or a set plus a playbook your team can use without coming back.
How do I create a contract for services?
Cover the parties, the services and any deliverables, timescales, fees and payment terms, who owns what is produced, confidentiality, liability limits, insurance if relevant, term and termination, and governing law. Then check the termination clause actually says what happens to work in progress and data.
Can you help me write a business contract?
Yes. Eliga drafts commercial agreements for technology and services businesses, either as one-off documents or as a reusable set. The first step is a short conversation about how the deal really works, because that is what determines the shape of the document.
What makes drafting good rather than just correct?
Correct drafting is enforceable. Good drafting is enforceable and readable by the people who have to operate it. If your account managers cannot tell from the contract when a renewal notice is due, the drafting has failed regardless of how legally sound it is.
Contract review and negotiation
Review tells you what you signed. Negotiation decides what you sign.
A contract review should produce three things: a list of what is unacceptable, a list of what is negotiable, and a plain statement of the risk if you sign as-is. A review that returns forty tracked changes and no view is not much use to a business trying to close a deal this quarter.
Before signing anything, the fastest useful check is the exit and the money: how does this end, what happens to data and work in progress, what does it cost to leave, and what is the maximum I can be liable for. Those four answers catch most of the real damage. After that, look at IP, indemnities and anything that lets the other side change the deal unilaterally.
Yes, you can change a contract before signing. Nothing is binding until both sides agree, and a proposed contract is a proposal. Once signed, changes need a variation, usually in writing and signed, because most commercial contracts contain a clause requiring exactly that. Negotiation after signature is possible but you have lost your leverage.
How do I review a contract before signing it?
Start with the exit, the money and the liability cap, because those decide the worst case. Then check the obligations you are taking on and whether you can actually perform them. Then check what the other side can change without asking you. Read the schedules; that is where the operational commitments hide.
Can you change a contract before signing?
Yes. Until both parties sign, everything is a proposal and anything can be amended. Ask for changes in a marked-up version with a short covering note explaining why, and prioritise. A request for three changes with reasons gets agreed; forty unexplained tracked changes gets escalated and slows the deal.
How much does a lawyer charge to review a contract in the UK?
It varies widely by firm and complexity, and the honest answer is that hourly quotes for contract review are hard to compare. Ask for a fixed fee for a defined scope, and ask what the output is: a risk summary and a redline is more useful than an hour of reading.
What is the cheapest way to get a contract reviewed?
A fixed fee review limited to the clauses that matter for your situation, rather than a full markup. If you send a contract with a note saying what worries you and what the deal is worth, a good adviser can scope down to the parts that carry real risk.
What is contract negotiation?
The process of agreeing terms that both sides will sign, which mostly means deciding who carries which risk and at what price. Effective negotiation is preparation: knowing your positions, your fallbacks and your walk-away before you start.
What should a contract negotiation playbook contain?
For each clause that matters: your preferred position, your acceptable fallback, your absolute floor, and who has authority to approve each level. Add standard responses to the objections you hear most. That document is what lets sales close deals without waiting for legal on every point.
How do I make deals close faster?
Standard terms your team knows, a playbook with pre-approved fallbacks, and someone available to decide rather than to advise. Most deal delay is not legal complexity, it is waiting for a decision nobody is empowered to make. This is exactly what embedded counsel fixes.
What if the other side will not move?
Separate what is genuinely fixed policy from what is just a first position. Ask why a clause matters to them, because there is often a different way to give them the protection they want. If a term is truly non-negotiable and unacceptable, price the risk into the deal or walk away, and decide which of those before the call rather than during it.
Contract management and legal operations
Most contract pain is not drafting. It is not knowing what you already signed.
Contract lifecycle management covers request, drafting, approval, signature, storage, obligation tracking and renewal. Businesses usually feel the pain at two points: nobody can find the signed version, and a renewal or notice deadline passes unnoticed.
You do not need a platform to fix that. A single repository, a naming convention, a spreadsheet of key dates and obligations, and a rule that nothing is signed without going through one route will solve it for most companies under a hundred contracts. Buy software when the manual process is genuinely straining, not before.
Approval workflow is the other half. A simple matrix of who can approve what, by value and by clause, removes most of the delay in a sales cycle. It also stops the situation where a salesperson agrees to unlimited liability by email because nobody told them they could not.
What are contract management best practices?
One repository with a single source of truth for executed contracts, consistent naming, extracted key dates and obligations, an approval matrix by value and risk, a standard template set with a playbook, and a calendared review of renewals and notice periods.
Do we need contract management software?
Only when the manual process is failing. The triggers are usually volume you cannot track, obligations being missed, or an audit requirement. Below that, a shared drive with discipline outperforms an underused platform.
What should a contract approval form include?
Counterparty, value, term, deviations from the standard template, the specific clauses varied and why, data protection implications, and the approver appropriate to the value and risk. Keeping it to one page is what makes it get used.
What happens if a contract is signed with a fake signature?
The contract is generally not binding on the person whose signature was forged, and forging a signature can be a criminal offence. Separately, a contract signed by someone without authority may still bind the company if the other side reasonably believed they had authority. This is one to take advice on rather than resolve by email.
Is electronic signature legally valid?
In the UK and EU, yes, for the vast majority of commercial contracts, provided you can evidence the signatory’s intention to authenticate. A few document types such as certain deeds and property documents have additional formality requirements.
Still the wrong answer for your situation?
General answers only go so far. If you have a contract on your desk, a negotiation stuck on one clause, or a template that no longer fits how you work, the useful conversation is about your facts.
Book a call: calendly.com/dhruve-eligaconsultancy
This page is general information about UK and EU commercial practice. It is not legal advice and it does not create a solicitor-client relationship.