“A lot of people see them as a rubber stamp or as something we’ve got to get done. And a lawyer’s role is to make them as watertight as possible. And I think, often, lawyers don’t even think about the fact that their clients need to run with this relationship and manage this. There’s something. It’s a business relationship, or it’s a transaction that you want to have go ahead and go ahead well.

“There’s so much that goes into contracts from creating them. There’s the technology piece. There’s the service design piece to map out how you want that client experience to be. There’s the legal content, which is really important to get right. And often, especially with the new laws that have come in around unfair contract terms, it is a great time to revisit your contracts and start to redesign them with balance, fairness, and all of those things in mind,” she explained.

“Everything that you do, whether you’re a lawyer or any other type of business owner, there’s a contractual relationship there. Whether or not that relationship’s written down, whether it’s verbal, whether it’s in a click-to-agree contract, or whether it’s in a get-out-a-quill-and-write-on-parchment contract, then those are all different types of agreements. And if you spend time getting to know some of your contracts, then you can make them really be that extra set of hands in your business or your law firm.”

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Whilst contracts can often be incredibly important to the day-to-day success of a law firm, Ms White has seen a number of law firms and legal departments rely on old precedents or have outdated clauses in their contracts.

“It kind of becomes a bit of a beast, which, as in-house especially, you have to go to different departments to try and talk to different teams to figure out what’s going on. And this can happen even with boutique firms, who, when they’re starting out, might get a precedent from somewhere else or from the law society, and they’re not quite sure whether or not it works for their business or maybe they’re doing things a little bit differently,” she added.  

“I don’t know that there are enough people who are as passionate about contracts as perhaps they should be or see the power that contracts can have — and also the negative influence that they can have on client experience if they’re done poorly.”

This was part of the reason Ms White founded Checklist Legal, which she started in the midst of the pandemic, as a side hustle from her in-house role at Telstra.

“It was just over a year ago that I went full-time into the law firm and kind of went on a bit of a spree of learning a whole bunch of things. And the reason for getting stuck into the law firm was that love of contracts and just that I ... the scale and the impacts that I wanted to have on contracts because I do think that there is a broader impact that we can have,” she said.

“I see the world where everyone can read and understand and use contracts, and that’s kind of maybe a bit grandiose. But the idea is that if I can work towards that, then that’s kind of where I want to move the legal profession towards, even if it’s just in our little corner of the world, so that the contracts that we use are easy to read.

“And then that has the ripple effect with all the clients that ultimately end up reading those contracts. The reason I suppose that I wanted to start my own law firm was just to have a go. I think to just do things differently.”

And moving forward, Ms White said there are a number of new developments in this space she’s particularly excited for.

“I’ve been lucky enough to work on some pretty exciting projects in 2022 that I’m hoping a lot of in 2023 will be coming out, industry-changing projects that can really push entire sectors of the law to do better. So, I want more of those. That’ll be good fun. But I’m also exploring things like virtual reality contracting [and] augmented reality contracting. That’s kind of really cool. I think there [are] some really exciting things that we can do in there for accessibility and also making things more modern and visual,” she explained.

“Also, smart contracts are something that’s quite interesting from a few different perspectives. I know that it’s sitting in a space that hasn’t been fully explored yet … but I still think it’s a good time for everyone to start engaging in things like AI and smart contracts and blockchain because you can start to shape the way that it will end up. So that way, we don’t get what we’ve always gotten. We get something different.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Verity White, click below: