Who said contracts can’t be fun?

Portret Matilde
Written by
Matilde Cantinho
Digital Content Producer
Jul 05, 2022 . 3 mins read
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If you know Koos by now, you probably recognise us from our visual, creative and fun culture and personality. So why not use this power of ours to innovate how we kick off our collaborations? We have been strong Visual Thinking advocates, so it only makes sense to apply it to our client negotiations and transform what is usually seen as a strict and lengthy process into a smooth, engaging and straightforward experience.

Together with Visual Contracts, we developed our Visual Terms & Conditions, and we’ve been nominated for the Gouden Zandlopers Award – a Dutch innovation award in the legal industry.

Building the right foundation from the start

As a strategic design agency focused on accelerating positive change through innovation, we wanted to bring Design Thinking to every level of our actions. We apply its value to our projects and how we agree and develop our client partnerships.

At Koos, we used to see traditional contract negotiations as cold-war deterrence, with two parties aiming endless pages with little black letters at each other. These negotiations are the exact opposite of how we like to approach our projects and build relationships internally and with our clients.

That is why we set ourselves to redesign the way we negotiate our collaboration with big corporations, together with Lieke Beelen and Dorrit Theunissen from Visual Contracts.

We moved away from boring, outdated terms and conditions towards a negotiation that aligns with our brand identity. The outcome is a visual, intuitive conversation starter that empowers our team to be more confident in explaining and discussing the topics that are important to us in a common language and emphasising the key points of our agreement in a simplified manner.

This is our first step towards signing contracts based on trust and aimed at building transparent, equal and long-term relationships.

Aligning with our core values

We used to be a bit scared of the big procurement departments with long documents filled with complex terminology and small print. Our new visual contract brings the conversation into an open and creative space, allowing easy understanding of the value we offer and what we expect in return in a visual and tangible way.

And the cool thing is that we are not just talking about invoicing, liability or IP. We are especially focusing on our values, our ethical compass, who we want to work with and what running a project with us will look like.

This pilot is very valuable, and we want to take it to the next level!

The next phase of this legal design approach will focus on applying the Visual Contracts in our other two offices (Lisboa and Berlin) while experimenting with the visual transformation process internally with our employee contracts.

Portret Matilde
Written by
Matilde Cantinho
Digital Content Producer
Jul 05, 2022 . 3 mins read
Share this article