Are you a lawyer? Only lawyers with something to sell or people working entirely in hypotheticals talk like this.
People who have actually hired lawyers and litigated things know what a shit show it all is.
> As per my original post. That statement is one made from the comfortable armchair of somebody who has not had to litigate off the back of a free/cheap ready-made contract.
I've done exactly that. You can create a contract by two people writing down what they agree on in bullet points and have it be binding and litigate it if you want instead too. It's actually pretty normal. Legal docs aren't magic, they're words that represent agreement between humans, and in litigation usually what's going on is a bunch of humans trying to figure out which narrative best represents the actual underlying agreement between the people in question.
> What is a waste of resources is paying a lawyer to try to get you off the hook for something that could have reasonably been in the contract in the first place had you had it drafted for your specific business context rather than relying on some shit internet template.
Even more of a waste of resources is paying a lawyer to sort of kind of pay attention for a few minutes to your requests before assuming you're like some other situation he's seen and giving you that person's template and charging you $3,500. Which is generally what happens to people if they don't know what they're doing.
Or, alternately, paying $25,000 for a real firm with domain expertise who do actually listen to you and successfully craft a great customized document that does in fact slightly improve on the template you would have used. And then none of those things ever actually happen and it doesn't end up mattering anyways.
> Yes, lawyers use base templates, but that's because there are some clauses that will always need to be there no matter what. However the devil is in the details and the lawyers also sit down with you to understand your business context and those templates get edited, sometimes heavily edited depending on the business context.
> The point is that you are paying the lawyer for their experience. They know what should be kept in the template. They know what should be removed from the template. They know what should be added to the template AND they know how to add stuff to the templates in a legally correct manner.
Yeah sure, that's possible. But in order to get good legal work you have to know what to ask for, and you have to be working with the right lawyer.
Most people aren't going to be good at either of those two things, and working from templates is quite likely to lead to better outcomes for those people at a tiny fraction of the cost.