The optional block/explainer bit is how Westlaw practical law works. It seems like the main advantage of this over having lawyers who each have access to some tool that is proposing optional sections is that in this model, the end users agree to limit themselves to the optional blocks but they aren’t getting advice on what they mean.
The first is an improvement but without the second I’d be a little concerned. The construction industry has stock contracts like these and I’ve seen them go sideways for sure.
To your point about advice on what the blocks mean, we've started to do two things related to this, and I'd be interested to know if either are close to what you have in mind.
2) In certain places within the app, we have tooltips with short explanations and links to longer help articles. So when you hover over "Auto renewal" we pop up the text "At the end of this contract, do you want your customer to automatically roll into another contract on the same terms? Learn more."
I'd also be interested to know which standard contracts you've seen in the construction industry. We're always trying to learn from other, related projects
I had not heard of ConsensusDocs, thanks for sharing. I'm especially fascinated by cases like these where you have to pay for access to the standard contracts. Looking forward to learning more about them.
Sounds good re the other question, thanks in advance
Generally speaking your approach seems good. You have the advantage of having “option” that are fairly easy to describe and rely more on the description of the business activity considered, not the law.
Take for example a LLC operating agreement. It might have a whole section about securities law and making sure all the members of the LLC are qualified investors, not on OFAC, Americans, fewer than 100 in number, not in need of liquidity, understand the risks, what have you. A closely held family farm would need none of this.
So in a commercial document templating service, “make sure none of the investors make our company ineligible to be an s-corp” would definitely be an option.
The design choice is whether you can get away with a user experience that asks the user “hey are you cool with not paying attention to a bunch of stuff investors might be interested in, but isn’t necessary to allow you to pass the farm to your kids?” Sure it’s a lot simpler not to have to know any of the law, and yes it’s impossible to really make the decision of which contract to use in an educated way without knowing a wide range of stuff.
I guess what I’m acknowledging is that my design suggestion of “be like west law” is mostly junk; you explicitly don’t want to do that because it would not spark any kind of customer joy (and plus, Westlaw is a thing already).
The first is an improvement but without the second I’d be a little concerned. The construction industry has stock contracts like these and I’ve seen them go sideways for sure.