[rhubarbcustard]

I travelled a fair distance to sign a contract with a third-party that I was contracting though for a major bank. They handed me a bunch of documents to sign and left me in a room for a while, I read them all thoroughly (took hours) and flagged up several things that were just plain wrong, stuff that made no sense and, similar to the OP, some clauses that suggested they wanted my first-born.

They were happy to change the details to fit what I wanted and we all went away happy. The thing that surprised me was when their intiial response was, "No-one has ever mentioned these before and we've been using these for years". I mean, the wording of the contracts could have gone very badly for me if things had gone south and we ended up in court.

Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.

[nanidin]

A sand volleyball venue in my city has a waiver that you have to sign to play in a league there. In the contract you have to agree that you won't own or operate a volleyball related business within a 30+ mile radius for three years.

I signed since I don't plan to open a volleyball business, but I raised it with the venue owner who basically said their lawyers suggested it and that only one other person objected to it over the last three years. He was willing to strike it out.

Anyway - people/businesses with clauses like this need feedback or they won't change it. I let the sand volleyball place know that I thought it was a scummy tactic, and that pushing something like that onto the rank and file patrons of a business is not appropriate for someone who chairs the community improvement district that the business is located in.

My takeaway was also that the vast majority of people just don't read what they sign.

[snowwrestler]

I doubt that term was enforceable anyway.

Random things don’t become real just because they’re written down. Contracts have to represent “a meeting of the minds” and there has to be adequate consideration (expensive asks should be paid for). Slipping an uncompensated noncompete clause into a sports liability waiver has a low chance of satisfying either principle.

[nanidin]

Yes, this was my thought as well. The beginning of the waiver read something like "In consideration of the services received from COMPANY NAME, ..." and my immediate reaction was "I'm the one paying you here, not the other way around." The owner is a real estate attorney so I'm sure he's not oblivious either.

[mooreds]

> Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.

Nope, not typically, in my experience. I'm one of the folks who does, and it usually catches the other folks by surprise.

I signed a contract for a blog post I was writing and in the contract it said I couldn't mention that I was working with said company. But they were going to put my name on the blog post? I asked the person who sent me the contract, "should I not share this blog post?".

They changed the contract with no issues, but it showed me that they were just using a standard contract that no one ever bothered to read.

[nkrisc]

> Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.

A lot of times, no. It happens to me even. I’m not a lawyer and I’m asked to sign contracts written by lawyers for other lawyers. I’ma reasonably smart guy and I can usually put two and two together in a contract, but often it’s written in a way that simply very difficult for me to understand and I can’t really tell what the contact is saying.

It’s a burden. If the stakes are small I might just sign it. Otherwise I might ask for clarification but most times you’re asked to sign something it’s assumed you’ll just take a minute to sign it so now you’ve thrown everything off.

I understand why contacts need precise language but I think it’s a bit unfair to expect lay people to sign contracts without a lawyer present much of the time.

[wolverine876]

> often it’s written in a way that simply very difficult for me to understand and I can’t really tell what the contact is saying.

My experience is that contracts are easy to read - much easier than code. For one thing, contracts are written to be completely unambiguous to a human (a judge), a goal which few coders attempt.

The challenge is knowing and applying what isn't in the contract: The outcome depends on the contract & the law & the court. The latter two apply many rules, many of which are complex or require judgment, and many also require anticipating how a judge might rule. You can write whatever you want in a contract - 'if Employee leaves Employer less than 10 years from the date this contract is signed, Employee must amputate Employee's left leg.' (And the last sentence brings demonstrates first point about the importance of non-ambiguity: If it said '... their left leg', whose leg is it?)

[toast0]

> Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.

Generally, no. Everyone always expresses real surprise when I actually read a contract before signing. Usually, I just end up signing because there's not often room for negotiation, and I want to do the thing that requires the contract, and whatever, but I'd rather know. I've gotten some contracts changed, but often it's not worth the effort, IMHO.

[gwd]

> Kind of makes me wonder if anyone actually bothers to read what they are signing.

I was in the military reserves, and one of the training weekends there was some thing they needed everyone to sign; I forget what it was, just something to make sure we were all aware of some random change in policy. I skimmed through the thing they asked us to sign, and one of the lines said, "I have received a pamphlet regarding $TOPIC." So I said, "Where are the pamphlets?" The admin person gave me a blank look and said, "What pamphlet?" I pointed to the text and said, "I'm signing to attest that I've received a pamphlet; I just wondered where it was."

I wasn't trying to rock the boat or make a big deal out of it, but generally if I sign something saying "I have received X" I want to have actually received X. Apparently I was the only person in the unit of 100+ people, including the admin staff, who actually read what they were signing.

[vmception]

This makes me wonder about having an app on the phone that reads the contract and does this flagging for you

[teddyh]

To really fix the problem, you’d need two more apps:

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/organization

[vmception]

I don’t really get the response here.

OCR the contract text and reveal the meaning of the clauses and how common they are. Flagging for further review.

iOS already does OCR on all images now, just no comparative analysis.

Not exactly farfetched, could save everyone time, could be baked into the OS, nothing for indie devs to salivate over.

[teddyh]

> I don’t really get the response here.

A reasonable response to the problem of “companies are trying to push dubious clauses in employment contracts” would be “make those dubious practices illegal and/or unenforceable”, or maybe “make obfuscated or hard-to-read contracts illegal and/or unenforceable”. Your response was instead, as in the linked comic strip, “let’s make an app to fix it!”.

[vmception]

But many clauses are already illegal and unenforceable

I’ll sign a contract in California that contains a noncompete clause because I’m completely ignoring it, for example

Interesting we are just operating on different information to reach different conclusions

Mine is about empowering an individual as the other parts have either already happened or never will happen

[teddyh]

Empowering individuals to solve societal problems rarely work, IMHO. Giving people guns doesn’t solve the crime problem; improving society to have less desperately poor people and drug addicts does. Giving people the ability to read and right to refuse contracts doesn’t give people better working conditions, empowering government and/or unions to enforce better conditions does. Building larger and more tank-like cars does not improve traffic safety; lowering and enforcing speed limits and seat belt laws does. Being conscious about your personal carbon footprint will not solve the climate crisis. Et cetera.