About

Team size: 16 people

Major legal advisers: Allen & Overy, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, Eversheds Sutherland, Norton Rose Fulbright, Reed Smith

Adam Khan, a global legal lead lawyer for Shell Retail, wanted to find a better way of sales contracting to put the customer first, preserve customer relationships, and make the process faster and fairer, while avoiding lengthy negotiations over hefty contracts and terms. The answer was to make the thousands of Shell’s sales contracts simple, accessible and fairer to the parties’ commercial positions, using plain language, clear formatting, and visual descriptions of the terms and conditions. ‘Customer account managers spend time trying to get that first sale and you don’t want lawyers unpicking that relationship,’ comments Khan.

The concept is as simple as using images, like a barge or a ship, when explaining delivery of marine lubricants, for example, to illustrate terms in a contract. Acknowledging that not everybody reads a contract in English, using images in contracts has also helped speed up the transaction time. ‘Using images does not turn contracts into comic books. It’s illustrative, like a newspaper. If you look at our marine terms and conditions, it’s clear who does what – we can write that down and we do. It’s always a complex question for legal to establish when ownership [of a product] has transferred.’

Khan, however, does not get excited about the novelty of his picture-contract idea: it is a back-to-basics method of making contracts more customer-centric and easier to understand, while cementing business relationships. The project has absorbed much of Khan’s time over the past year and has already seen more than 150 contracts in Shell’s marine business become illustrative. Putting the contracts in plain English and reforming their layout was a crucial first step in redesigning the legal agreements.

‘The idea came about because I had a lot of customer feedback that said our agreements were too long,’ he comments. ‘Clauses have been condensed into short summaries in side bars within the contracts and there is more space on the page for ease of reading. It’s about chopping up bits of the contracts for the best audience.’

Proving a success so far, Khan is now working to roll graphic contracts out this year in other parts of Shell’s global commercial business, such as specialities and lubricants. ‘It’s not just lawyers who look at contracts,’ Khan says. ‘They are the living embodiment of relationships and contracts are supposed to hold a mirror up to what goes on in practice, because sometimes they can get a bit divorced from what we’re trying to do.’