The Dramaturg's Red Pen: What Theatre Can Teach In-House Teams About Contract Drafting

The Scene-Setter

A dramaturg working on a new production faces a familiar task: reading a script and deciding what stays and what goes. Overlong monologues, scenes that serve no narrative purpose, plot threads that confuse rather than illuminate. The red pen comes out. The rule is simple, even if the execution is not: every element must earn its place or be cut.

A legal academic writing for Verfassungsblog recently drew a parallel between this theatrical discipline and the craft of legal writing, observing that good texts, like good theatre, require the author to "think about the audience." The observation sounds modest. For anyone who has sat through a 47-clause master services agreement that could have been 22 clauses, it lands with some force.

The Over-Written Contract

In-house legal teams and their external advisers have spent decades accumulating drafting habits that prioritise comprehensiveness over clarity. The instinct is understandable. Every clause exists because, at some point, someone got burned by its absence. Boilerplate provisions propagate across template libraries. Definitions sections expand to cover every theoretical contingency. Force majeure clauses that began life as one paragraph now run to five.

The result is contracts that commercial counterparties do not read, that operations teams cannot follow, and that generate more negotiation than they prevent. The audience, to borrow the theatrical metaphor, has stopped paying attention by the time the curtain rises on the operative provisions.

This is not merely an aesthetic problem. Contracts that are too long to read are contracts that are too long to enforce. Obligations buried in sub-clauses get missed. Deadlines hidden in schedules get overlooked. Ambiguities that a careful edit would have caught become disputes.

What the Dramaturg Actually Does

The theatrical editor does not simply delete. The work involves identifying what the piece is actually trying to achieve, then asking whether each element serves that purpose. A scene that duplicates information the audience already holds is cut. A subplot that does not connect to the central conflict is removed. A monologue that tells rather than shows is rewritten or replaced.

Applied to contract drafting, this translates into a set of concrete questions. Does this definition appear more than once in the operative text? Does this representation repeat a warranty that follows three clauses later? Does this schedule contain information that belongs in the body of the agreement? Does this clause address a risk that the governing law already allocates by default?

The answers are frequently uncomfortable. Standard templates, even good ones, tend to accumulate redundancy over time. Provisions drafted for one deal travel into templates where they do not belong. The responsible editor, whether human or AI-assisted, needs to read the whole document with genuine attention to what the counterparty and the business team will actually encounter.

Where AI Fits Into the Editorial Process

This is precisely the kind of work where a well-designed CLM platform can add genuine value, provided it is built to read contracts from the perspective of the party using it rather than as a neutral extractor of clauses.

Adira approaches drafting and review from the client's side of the table. That means asking not only whether a provision is legally valid in the relevant jurisdiction, but whether it creates obligations the client's operations team can realistically meet, whether it imposes liabilities the business has actually assessed, and whether it introduces ambiguity that will generate future arguments. It also means flagging redundancy, identifying provisions that conflict with each other, and suggesting where a clause can be shortened without losing its legal effect.

The dramaturg's instinct, applied systematically across a contract portfolio, changes the nature of the drafting process. Templates become leaner over successive iterations. Negotiation focuses on the provisions that actually matter. Counterparties move faster because they are reading documents they can understand.

Editing as a Legal Competence

Law schools do not, on the whole, teach editing. They teach analysis, argument and structure. The capacity to look at a finished piece of legal writing and cut it by a third without losing anything material is treated as a secondary skill, something that develops with experience rather than something that can be taught or systematised.

That assumption is worth questioning. The cost of over-written contracts, measured in negotiation time, operational misunderstanding and eventual disputes, is substantial. The ability to identify and remove what is unnecessary is not a cosmetic skill. It is a core part of making contracts work.

The dramaturg knows this. The audience does not come to admire comprehensiveness. They come to follow a story that holds their attention and tells them something true. Commercial contracts are not theatre, but the underlying demand is recognisably similar: say what you mean, say it once, and trust the reader to follow.