Contract Design for In-House Counsel: How Smarter Agreements Drive Business Value

How many contracts are buried in your systems—signed, filed, and forgotten until something goes wrong?

If you’re working in-house, you’ve probably seen it firsthand: contracts turning into clutter instead of bringing clarity. They pile up in shared drives or folders, collecting dust until there’s an issue—and by then, it’s usually too late.

But what if those same documents could actually work for your business? What if they helped teams move faster, communicate more clearly, and spot risks before they become problems?

That’s the promise behind contract design for in-house counsel. It’s a shift away from dense legal formality and toward documents that are functional, strategic, and easy to use.

Electra Japonas—legal tech innovator and founder of TLB—explained why contract design is long overdue for an upgrade. Her work is all about making contracts more useful and accessible—not just for legal teams, but for the people across the business who rely on them every day.

Watch the full conversation with Electra Japonas here:

Electra argues that contracts shouldn’t just live in drawers or shared drives. They’re full of business-critical data—deadlines, obligations, rights, and risks—that should be used to guide decisions. Yet most in-house teams don’t have a way to access or activate that information. Contract design for in-house counsel means changing how we write, structure, and manage agreements to make that data visible and actionable.

This approach doesn’t just improve efficiency—it improves outcomes. When contracts are easier to understand and navigate, non-legal teams are more likely to follow through on terms. When legal departments can track key clauses and timelines, they can anticipate problems instead of reacting to them. Electra sees this as not just a legal innovation, but an operational one.

Her OneNDA initiative shows what this looks like in real life. Instead of reinventing the wheel with every new nondisclosure agreement, Electra and her collaborators created a simple, standardized NDA template that thousands of legal teams now use. It’s clean, modular, and easy to adapt—showing that standardization doesn’t have to mean generic. It can actually lead to faster, clearer, more consistent agreements.

But the idea of contract design for in-house counsel goes far beyond NDAs. Electra encourages legal teams to think about all agreements through a usability lens. Can someone outside legal understand the core terms? Are obligations clearly assigned and tracked? Could your business unit actually act on what’s in the contract without having to call you?

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Electra’s work is a challenge to rethink the value of customization. Not every clause needs to be unique. Not every contract needs to be complex. In fact, the more bespoke your agreements become, the harder they often are to manage. Electra suggests applying a cost-benefit mindset: is this level of customization really worth the added time, confusion, and legal spend?

By embracing smarter design, in-house counsel can reduce noise, improve collaboration, and spend more time on high-value work. That’s the real power of contract design for in-house counsel—it frees up your legal team to be not just protectors of the business, but partners in how it grows.

And in today’s fast-moving world, that kind of shift isn’t just helpful—it’s essential.

Watch the full conversation here:  Notes to My (Legal) Self: Season 3, Episode 18 ( Electra Japonas )

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