Why Using Contract Templates Could End up Costing you More

The top reasons why contracts fail when you use a template or form:

1. People fill it out incorrectly or inadequately, due to not understanding what the sentence or clause means. I see quite too often people crossing out language in pre-made contracts, filling in the wrong information, writing on the margins, or left blank areas that have not been filled out. When this happens, you can run into problems when trying to enforce the contract, since everything is not laid out clearly for the parties to understand or for the courts to enforce.

2. The form lacks clauses or language specific to your situation. Your legal issue is like a story, and every story has a set of different facts and circumstances. If you fail to tailor these various conditions or language into the contract, there is almost no point in having a contract at all.

3. The form is not in favor of you, and sometimes designed to be in favor of the opposing party. Quite often, someone in the transaction is the one who provides the contract, for example, when you go buy a laptop, you as the consumer probably are not making the seller sign your contract or the terms of sale agreement. As a result, contracts are generally made in favor of one party. In the situation of a landlord and tenant, if you are the the landlord, and you got a template from online, the premise contract might be drafted in favor of the tenant. In addition, the form might not cover all the clauses that usually are in contracts that protect a landlord. Most detrimentally, the template can even be missing clauses that are mandatory by law, in protection of the tenant. In this case, a tenant will have many ways to cancel the lease agreement.

4. The form doesn't contain enough information. Sometimes a contract requires a notary, sometimes it requires a social security number, or perhaps an address or drivers license number. Using templates and prepared contract forms may cause you trouble in the long run when a crucial fact is missing and there is no way to get that information in order to enforce it in court.