Customised Standardisation: The Strategic Discipline That Will Help Make Your Contracting Function Future Ready

Introduction: The Lawyer’s Reflex

Lawyers are trained to spot exceptions. It’s our superpower. We see the edge cases, the outliers, the "what ifs" that others miss.  After all, if we don’t, how do we show our value? This instinct is what makes us indispensable-but it can also become a barrier to progress. 

However, this reflex manifests as a compulsion to comment, tweak, and customise-even when the base document is sound. It’s not just habit; it’s identity. We’re wired to protect, to perfect, to personalise. And in doing so, we often slow down the very business we’re meant to enable. In the context of legal template standardisation projects, many lawyers feel compelled to comment on everything. 

But the modern legal function demands more. It demands scale, speed, and strategic clarity. Endless customisation is no longer a badge of honour-it’s a bottleneck. True legal value lies in knowing what can be standardised, what must be customised, and how to build scalable infrastructure that supports both.

This article explores the tension between legal instinct and operational efficiency. It unpacks the behavioural drivers behind resistance to standardisation, the strategic risks of inefficiency, and the transformative power of customised standardisation. It shows how standardisation is not the enemy of nuance-it’s the framework that allows lawyers to focus on the exceptions that truly matter.

And most importantly, it makes the case that standardisation is not just a strategic choice-it’s a technological imperative particularly if you want to modernise and automate your contracting function. Without it, legal teams cannot digitise, automate, or scale. With it, they become future-ready, indispensable, and aligned with the exponential needs of the business.

Let’s reframe the lawyer’s reflex that poses an attendant  headwind to legal template standardisation projects. By doing so, in-house teams can efficiently  build the infrastructure that lets lawyers do what they do best: solve the problems that truly matter  - whilst hardness the time and cost saving benefits of legal tech.

The Real Risk: Inefficiency

Operational inefficiency is not just a nuisance-it’s a strategic risk that undermines the legal department’s ability to scale, support the business, and deliver value. When lawyers treat every transaction as unique, and start endless rounds of edits to the underlying tempalte they wish to start with, they can unintentionally create a cascade of negative consequences that compound over time.

1. Delays That Erode Business Momentum

Vanilla transactions-NDAs, MSAs, standard procurement contracts-should be fast. But when lawyers over-customise, these deals take days or weeks instead of hours. This slows down procurement, sales, partnerships, and internal approvals, frustrating stakeholders and eroding trust in the legal function. You might be buying strawberry ice cream, not chocoloate ice cream - but it is still ice cream. The flavour does not change the tub that it comes in.

2. Cost Blowouts from Low-Value Legal Work

Every unnecessary tweak adds time. Every deviation requires review. Legal hours are spent on stylistic preferences or hypothetical risks rather than strategic matters. This is not just inefficient-it’s expensive. Legal budgets are consumed by avoidable work.

3. Inconsistency That Breeds Risk

When contracts vary unnecessarily, the business loses predictability. Risk profiles shift. Compliance becomes harder. Training and related assets become harder to leverage. Disputes become more likely. And legal loses visibility over what’s actually being agreed across the organisation.

4. Loss of Scale and Repeatability

Without standardisation, legal teams cannot scale. Every contract becomes a one-off. Institutional knowledge is trapped in individual lawyers’ heads. There’s no easily repeatable process which in turns impacts the ability to automate and leverage.

5. Frustration and Erosion of Legal’s Reputation

Business units want speed and clarity. When legal becomes a bottleneck, it damages relationships. Lawyers are seen as blockers, not enablers. This perception is hard to reverse.

6. Missed Opportunities for Strategic Impact

Time spent on low-value customisation is time not spent on high-value strategy, risk management, or innovation. Lawyers are pulled into the weeds and lose the opportunity to operate at the level the business truly needs.

Standardisation is the antidote. It enables speed, consistency, and scale. It frees lawyers to focus on what matters. And it transforms legal from a reactive service function into a proactive strategic partner.

Standardisation Is Not Inflexibility

One of the most persistent misconceptions about standardisation is that it equates to rigidity. In reality, effective standardisation is built on flexibility-it’s about creating frameworks that reflect what happens most of the time, while allowing for thoughtful, controlled variation where it truly matters.

Standard templates are not static or simplistic.  A standardised template can still flex to accomodate a wide range of deal specifics.  A good template is designed to:

◼️Accommodate customisation: Through structured fields for service descriptions, SLAs, consequences, and licences.

◼️Enable optionality: With fallback clauses, escalation paths, and jurisdictional modules that can be toggled based on context.

◼️Support evolution: Templates are living assets, continuously refined based on usage data, feedback, and legal developments.

In fact, standardisation is what makes flexibility manageable. With it, deviations are anticipated, documented, and governed.

The real danger lies in the absence of standardisation. Without a clear baseline, legal teams lose control over risk profiles, contract architecture, and delivery consistency. Templates become fragmented. Clause banks become unusable. And legal loses its ability to scale. 

Standardisation is not about ignoring nuance-it’s about creating a system where nuance can be applied intelligently, consistently, and strategically. It’s the infrastructure that enables agility, not the enemy of it.

When lawyers resist standardisation in the name of flexibility, they often end up creating inefficiency, inconsistency, and confusion. True flexibility comes from having a strong, standardised foundation that allows for smart, scalable exception handling. Without standardisation, every deviation becomes a bespoke exercise - and your template library this grows exponentially and become increasingly hard to manage, let alone digitise.

In short, standardisation is not inflexibility-it’s the only way to make flexibility work at scale.

Standard templates are not rigid-they’re designed to reflect what happens most of the time.  The resistance often comes from stylistic preferences-not substantive legal issues. And when lawyers say "this doesn’t apply to my market," they’re often reacting to tone, not law.

And, news flash, most standard commercial business as usual templates can work globally. If you remove outlier legal jurisdictions such as China – in a standard commercial agreement – there are perhaps 8 issues that might genuinely require a local law deviations – regardless of whether it is a common law or civil law jurisdiction. 

Understanding Lawyer Behaviour: Why We Resist Standardisation

To shift mindsets, we must first understand them. 

Lawyers aren’t resisting standardisation because they don’t see its value-they’re resisting it because of deeply ingrained professional behaviours, identity markers, and internal dynamics. 

Ironically, these behaviours make us good lawyers-but poor standardisers. 

The goal is not to suppress these instincts entirely, but to redirect them to where they are valuable, and contain them where they are not.

1. Validation Through Contribution

Lawyers often feel the need to “add value” by commenting, tweaking, or redrafting-even when the base document is sound. It’s a way of signalling expertise, reinforcing relevance, and demonstrating that we’re across the detail. Silence can feel like abdication.

“If I don’t change anything, how do I prove I’ve done my job?”

2. Risk Mitigation by Redundancy

We’re trained to mitigate risk by saying things multiple ways, layering protections, and covering every angle. This leads to over-engineering-where the instinct to protect becomes a barrier to clarity and efficiency.

“If I say it three different ways, one of them will stick.”

3. Placating the Internal Client

Sometimes, lawyers know standardisation is the right path-but they defer to internal stakeholders who are more comfortable with the “devil they know.” Lawyers become translators of legacy preferences, even when those preferences are inefficient or outdated.

“I know this isn’t necessary, but the business likes it this way.”

4. Fear of Oversight or Blame

Standardisation can feel like exposure. If something goes wrong, lawyers fear being blamed for not spotting the exception. Customisation feels safer-it’s a way of hedging against future scrutiny.

“If I tailor it, I can defend it. If I use the template, I’m exposed.”

5. Professional Identity: The Bespoke Mindset

Lawyers are trained to treat every matter as unique. The idea of using a “standard” anything can feel like a betrayal of that training. We pride ourselves on nuance, precision, and bespoke thinking.

“Every deal is different. That’s why they need me.”

6. Perfectionism and Control

Many lawyers are perfectionists. Standardisation feels like relinquishing control-accepting something that’s “good enough” rather than “perfect.” This mindset can slow down adoption even when the standard is fit for purpose.

“I wouldn’t have written it that way.”

7. Misunderstanding What Standardisation Actually Is

Some lawyers equate standardisation with rigidity. They don’t realise that modern templates allow for optionality, customisation, and evolution. The resistance is often based on a false binary: standard vs. bespoke, when the reality is far more nuanced.

“Standardisation means I lose flexibility.”

Reframing the Lawyer’s Role

Lawyers must be experts in both standardisation and exception management. That means:

1. Recognising what can be standardised: Understanding common transaction constructs and defending the practice of standardisation.

2. Identifying true exceptions: Where deviation is justified by:

◼️Business model misalignment

◼️Counterparty position

◼️Legal incompatibility

3. Standardising the exceptions: Even non-standard positions follow patterns. Over time, these can be captured in business unit specific templates (in exceptional cases), clause banks and playbooks.

This is customised standardisation-a discipline where even exceptions become predictable, repeatable, and scalable.

Even in the realm of exceptions, 80% of deviations follow similar patterns. The facts don’t support the standard position, the counterparty won’t accept it, or the law doesn’t allow it. These are the only three legitimate grounds for deviation. And each can be addressed with a standardised response.

The Path to Legal Efficiency

Here’s how standardisation works in practice:

1. Build the standard position for a given transaction type.

2. Identify legitimate exceptions (business model, counterparty, law).

3. Standardise your response to those exceptions-80% will follow similar patterns.

4. For truly unique cases, define a Day 1 standardised approach that doesn’t derail the broader process.

Standardisation is not about ignoring uniqueness-it’s about documenting it, codifying it, and making it repeatable.

The Lawyer’s Value: Strategic Custodian

You are not just a commentator-you are the custodian of legal infrastructure. Your role is to:

◼️Curate scalable legal processes

◼️Trade up to higher-quality problems

◼️Build systems that allow the business to move fast, safely

Standardisation frees your diary to focus on the exceptions. It puts non-exceptional transacting on a clear, predictable pathway-so you can focus where your expertise is truly needed.

The "Yeah, But" Objection

There will always be someone in the room who says, “Yeah, but that doesn’t apply to me and my role.”

Sure-your role might be supporting a business unit that genuinely operates differently. But once you understand how that unit works, its needs can be documented. That documentation becomes the standardised approach for that unit.

You are not the exception. You are the author of a new standard.

Future Readiness: Why Standardisation Is Non-Negotiable

Standardisation is not just about operational efficiency-it is the foundation of future readiness for any legal department’s contracting function. As legal teams move toward digitisation and the adoption of Contract Lifecycle Management Systems (CLMS), the need for standardised templates becomes critical.

Without standardisation, the promised benefits of CLMS-automated document assembly, clause bank integration, one-touch template updates, and centralised risk control-simply cannot be realised. Clause banks rely on consistent template architecture. Automated workflows depend on predictable document structures. And template libraries must be centrally governed to avoid fragmentation.

If templates are not standardised wherever it is sensible to do so, libraries quickly spiral out of control-like a garden overcome by weeds. This can happen rapidly. Worse still, users begin to save and circulate localised versions of templates they prefer, leading to a breakdown in uniform risk management and a meaningful loss of control over the contracting process by the legal team.

In this context, standardisation is not a preference-it is a prerequisite. Regardless of individual lawyers’ views or internal client comfort levels, the department must adopt a unified position. The imperative to digitise and modernise the contracting function far outweighs personal drafting preferences.

Technology is now the most potent arbitrator of form. If exponential gains are to be realised-speed, consistency, analytics, scalability-then standardisation must be embraced. It is the gateway to transformation.

Final Thought

Your obsession with exceptions is not the problem-it’s the solution. But it only works if you have the time and space to apply it where it matters. Standardisation gives you that space. It’s not about ignoring risk-it’s about managing it intelligently, at scale.

And now, more than ever, standardisation is not just a strategic choice-it’s a technological imperative. Legal departments cannot digitise their contracting function, adopt CLMS platforms, or realise exponential efficiency gains without a foundation of standardised templates. The future of legal operations depends on it.

Customised standardisation is the discipline that allows lawyers to be strategic, scalable, and indispensable-without drowning in low-value work. It’s how we build the infrastructure that lets lawyers do what they do best: solve the problems that truly matter.