Together, Lina and Kamilla started rebuilding and rewriting contracts, shaped by the feedback, needs and perspectives of more than 200 internal and external stakeholders. Structure before wording. Information grouped around the moment someone needs it, not the order of a lawyer’s thinking. Obligations lifted out of the prose and set out as a checklist. Active voice instead of passive. Content cut rather than reworded. The result was a document designed to guide the relationship, not simply be filed away or built to win a dispute.

The obvious objection is whether a plainer contract still holds up in court. Kamilla, who fully intends to win any litigation she is in, argues it cuts the other way. Clear obligations prevent the disputes from reaching a courtroom in the first place. And if a relationship ends up in court, it is over.

AI was part of the brief from the beginning. “We knew from day one that these contracts would have to work with AI, not just with people,” says Kamilla.

An AI tool can only check a document against a standard, and most companies have never agreed on one. Twenty versions of the same agreement are in circulation, each wording the same obligation differently, none of them marked as the position the company actually wants to hold, the fallback or the clear no-go area.

“If you cannot say what your own standard is, and which parts are negotiable and within which limits, there is nothing for the technology to measure against,” says Lina. “It will give you a summary. It cannot give you an answer.”

“What Kamilla and Lina did has not been attempted at this scale in pharma,” says Emma Maria Calleja, co-founder of Von Peach. “Most legal design stops at one contract or policy as a showcase. This went into every market and every language, and it holds up.”

"Design changes the contract. People make it work."

A better contract still has to be adopted, and most changes fail at exactly this point. The document improves, but nothing else does.

“Companies confuse telling people with helping them understand,” says Emma. The defence is always the same, she says, and she recites it: “It was in clause 3 on page 27. We told them. Nobody read it.”

That is where Von Peach comes in. They built the communications campaign behind the rollout and treated the hundreds of people using these contracts every day as the audience. The loudest sceptics were handed the stage rather than managed behind the scenes.

“You can design the best contract in the world and still fail,” says Kamilla. “The rollout meant bringing the right knowledge and people together to build trust and reach a signature faster. The storytelling, the visuals and the community Von Peach built around it made all the difference.”

Legal alone would have written a better contract nobody adopted. Design alone would have built something the organisation never absorbed. Communications and change management alone would have promoted a document that still didn’t work.

The contract had to work on three levels: legally, for the people using it and across the organisation adopting it. Rewriting the document solved only the first part of the problem.

Together they rebuilt both the contracts and the way people understood and used them.

The contracts that hold up over the next decade won’t be the longest or the most defensive. They’ll be the ones people understand, trust and use.