Last year I sat in a meeting where our VP of Sales waved a contract at me and said, “Dave, this vendor is saying we owe them for an extra year. Is that right?” I pulled up the agreement. The auto-renewal clause was on page fourteen, paragraph 8(b), buried in a sentence that ran nine lines long without a period. I read it twice. I’m the contracts guy, and I had to read it twice.

“Yeah,” I told him. “It’s right there.”

“Where?”

I pointed at the screen. He squinted. He read it. He looked at me like I’d written it in Klingon.

He’s not dumb. He’s one of the sharpest people at the company. But that clause was never written for him to understand. It was written for a lawyer to point at in a courtroom, which is a very different purpose than “help the people who actually signed this thing know what they agreed to.”

That moment crystallized something I’d been thinking about for years: the readability of contracts isn’t a “nice to have” that legal teams should get around to someday. It’s an operational problem, and if you manage contracts, it’s your problem specifically.

The Fiction We All Participate In

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the entire system of contract management is built on the assumption that people read the contract. The legal concept is called the “duty to read.” You sign it, you’re bound by it, whether you read it or not. Courts have upheld this for decades.

But almost nobody reads the contract.

A 2017 Deloitte survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers found that 91% consent to terms and conditions without reading them. For younger adults (18 to 34), the figure was 97%. And that’s consumer agreements, the ones that affect your personal life. Business contracts don’t fare much better. A 2025 Adobe survey of over 1,700 respondents found that 69% of consumers and 62% of small business owners admitted to signing contracts without knowing all the details. Among knowledge workers at large companies, 61% said the same.

Those aren’t fringe cases. That’s the majority. The majority of people who sign contracts don’t fully understand what they signed.

And this isn’t consequence-free. That same Adobe survey found that nearly a third of knowledge workers (32%) had faced negative workplace consequences, including disciplinary action and even termination, because they signed a contract they didn’t fully understand. Two-thirds of consumers discovered unexpected terms after signing. Fifteen percent described what they found as “horrifying.”

We can shake our heads at that, or we can ask the more useful question: why?

It’s Not Laziness. It’s Design.

The easy answer is that people are lazy and don’t bother reading. I used to believe that. Then I started paying attention to what happens when people actually try.

Researchers at MIT spent years studying exactly what makes legal language so hard to process. They analyzed 3.5 million words of legal contracts, comparing them against newspaper articles, movie scripts, and academic papers. What they found was that the biggest problem isn’t jargon (though that doesn’t help). It’s something called “center-embedding,” which is a technical term for the habit lawyers have of inserting long definitions in the middle of a sentence. You start reading a clause, then a parenthetical definition appears, then a sub-definition of that definition, and by the time you reach the verb you’ve forgotten what the subject was.

Here’s a real example from the MIT study. Original:

“In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company (all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the ‘Total Payments’), would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced.”

Rewritten:

“In the event that any payment or benefit by the Company would be subject to excise tax, then the cash severance payments shall be reduced. All payments and benefits by the Company shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘Total Payments.’”

Same meaning. Completely different readability. And here’s the part that should matter to every contracts professional: in a follow-up study published in 2023, the MIT team found that lawyers also struggled with traditional legal text. Lawyers preferred the plain English versions. And they rated plain English contracts as equally enforceable.

So the people who write the contracts don’t like reading them either. Nobody likes reading them. We’ve just collectively decided that’s fine, because the legal system only cares whether you signed, not whether you understood.

Why This Is a Contract Management Problem

If you’re a contracts manager or legal ops person, you might be thinking, “I didn’t write the contract. I just manage it.” Fair. But managing a contract that nobody reads is like maintaining a filing system that nobody uses. The work happens, but the value doesn’t.

I’ve watched this play out the same way at every company I’ve worked at. Legal drafts the agreement. Sales sends it to the customer. The customer’s procurement team maybe reads it, maybe doesn’t. Both sides sign. The contract goes into the repository. Then, six months later, someone on the operations team does something that violates a service level they didn’t know existed, because they never read the contract. Or a vendor invoices for something that looks wrong but is actually spelled out in Section 12(c), which nobody on the business side has ever opened.

The contract did its legal job. It created a binding agreement. But it failed its operational job, which is to help the actual humans involved understand what they’re supposed to do.

That gap between “legally binding” and “actually understood” is where most of my job happens. And the older I get, the less patience I have for pretending it’s somebody else’s problem.

What I Actually Do About It

I’m not going to tell you to rewrite every contract in plain English. I don’t control most of the contracts that come through my desk, and neither do you. Vendor agreements, customer MSAs that legal spent six months negotiating, templates that haven’t been updated since 2019: we manage what we have, not what we wish we had.

But there are things I’ve started doing that have made a real difference.

I write one-page summaries for every agreement that matters. Not for legal. For the people who actually have to live with the contract: project managers, account managers, department heads. The summary covers: what we’re paying, what we’re getting, when it renews, what the notice period is, and any obligations we have to track. Plain language. No defined terms. One page. I keep these in ContractSafe attached to the contract record, so anyone who pulls up the agreement sees the summary first.

I flag the three clauses that will actually bite someone. Every contract has a handful of provisions that matter in practice: the renewal clause, the termination notice period, the SLA, the limitation of liability. I highlight these and send them to the business owner with a note that says, essentially, “Here are the three things you need to know.” I don’t send them the whole contract. I’ve accepted that they won’t read the whole contract.

I use renewal alerts as a forcing function. When someone gets a 90-day renewal reminder from ContractSafe, they actually engage with the contract for the first time since they signed it. That’s my window. I attach the one-page summary to the alert. Suddenly they’re reading something that makes sense, at the exact moment it’s relevant.

I push back on unnecessary complexity during review. When I’m involved in a contract review (which is more often than you’d think for someone who isn’t a lawyer), I’ll flag clauses that are needlessly convoluted and ask, “Can we simplify this?” Sometimes the answer is no, because there’s a legal reason for the specific language. But surprisingly often, the answer is, “Yeah, that clause was just copied from the last template.” GE Aviation found that rewriting their contracts in plain language cut negotiation time by 60%. Sixty percent. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a different process.

The Uncomfortable Truth

I know contracts professionals who treat readability as a “soft” issue, something the plain-language crowd cares about but that doesn’t affect the bottom line. I used to think that too.

Then I started adding up the hours I spent explaining contracts to people who had already signed them. The meetings where someone was surprised by a term that was right there in the agreement. The renewals that slipped because the person responsible didn’t understand the notice window. The vendor disputes that started because an operations manager didn’t know about an obligation buried in paragraph 14.

All of those things are costs. They’re just distributed across so many people and so many months that nobody adds them up. But if I’m being honest, I spend at least a quarter of my time as a contracts manager dealing with the consequences of contracts that were technically signed but never truly understood.

That’s the real cost of unreadable contracts. Not a lawsuit. Not a regulatory fine. Just a slow, steady bleed of time and money and trust, spread across every department that touches an agreement they never read.

You can’t fix all of it. But you can stop pretending the problem doesn’t exist, and start building systems that assume nobody’s going to read page fourteen, paragraph 8(b).

Because they’re not. And once you accept that, you can actually start helping.

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I’m Dave, and I write about contract management the way it actually works. No jargon, no sales pitch, just what I’ve learned from 15+ years of doing this job. New posts every Tuesday and Thursday.