We Agree - accelerated contract drafting

"Hiring !" Weagree has a vacancy

Do you want to work with leading innovators and large organisations receptive to new ideas?

Personal Assistant

In view of an increasing workload and new customers, Weagree is looking for a personal assistant to Willem Wiggers. The job is for a period of three to four months, and may be extended, depending on Weagree's further development.

Weagree accelerates contract drafting by providing contract assembly software (‘Weagree Wizard') combined with model contract upgrading services. Weagree was founded in 2007. This year, we were nominated for the global Innovating Justice Award. The Weagree Wizard is a highly innovative and user-friendly software application. The application is groundbreaking for the legal services industry, significantly impacting the traditional ways of working, which is both challenging and very inspiring.

We - the Weagree team of three enthusiasts - consider ‘excellence', ‘learning' and ‘authenticity' to reflect our values. Our targeted customers are large multinationals, leading law firms and large organisations, in particular those that are receptive to innovations and new ideas. Currently, we are working on business development, marketing, sales, product development, upgrading our customers' model contracts and implementing those contracts in the Weagree Wizard.

We're looking for an independent and creative mind with the following qualities:

• An academic level of thinking
• Excellence in text writing
• Fluency in English
• An affinity with working for large multinationals
  (i.e. striving for the highest quality, being accurate, respectable)
• Clever with computers (i.e. logic thinking), enjoys solving puzzles
• Legal background not necessary; being practical with contracts is a plus
• Marketing and communication skills are a plus

Your job will be to assist Willem Wiggers in the various aspects of launching Weagree and implementing the Weagree contract assembly software for our customers. Frankness and openness towards colleagues are much appreciated. You will collaborate with customers' legal counsel, as well as with Weagree's partners. Initially, your main task will be to assist in building contract templates and related questionnaires into the Weagree Wizard. This requires creativity and tailored work, and tells you a lot about how multinationals 'think' and operate.

The terms of your employment or consultancy will be established in mutual agreement. You will be working from our office in central Amsterdam.

The video here shows you the Weagree contract drafting wizard.
For more information contact Willem Wiggers: +31 (0)20 - 616 9696
Please send your letter and CV to: info@weagree.com

In this blog post, I will highlight a few legal traditions. The division into categories might help a lawyer assessing the potential effects of a certain choice of law. Obviously, when categorising the world's legal systems, generalisation is inevitable. Still, if you avoid any such approach, you'd probably hire a foreign attorney each time a contracting counterparty refuses to work under your law. In this post, and a few to come, I will focus on contract interpretation aspects.

Three main legal traditions. Three approaches to legal practice can be distinguished, each representing the characteristics of the legal culture behind it:

• The Roman legal culture;
• The Germanic legal tradition; and
• most visibly impacting the size of a contract, the common law.

Other legal families. Also other cultures can be identified, such as the Scandinavian ‘family', the (former) socialist countries, Arab (or Islamic) legal culture, the Hindu tradition and various mixtures: the Scottish and South African legal systems are somewhat of a mixture between common law and civil law; Japanese law has been influenced by both U.S. common law and German law; Turkish law by the Swiss codification of around 1900; Russian law by several European legal systems including the Dutch civil code of 1992[1]. In Africa the influence of the former coloniser is often well recognisable (in many cases either the French or the English legal system has been adopted, but developed independently). Elsewhere, the British Commonwealth jurisdictions have adopted the English common law.

[1]      Many other classifications have been made (and their classification questioned). See Konrad Zweigert & Hein Kötz, Einführung in die Rechtsvergleichung, JCB Mohr Tübingen 1996, 3rd ed. and Reinhard Zimmermann & Mathias Reimann, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law, Oxford U.P., 2006/2008, 1456 p.