A first-draft agreement that saves the lawyer time instead of replacing them
The situation
Small ventures and student businesses need agreements — contractors, interns, suppliers, collaborators — and the usual outcomes are both bad: pay for drafting from scratch, or sign something downloaded and hope. The useful middle is a structured first draft plus an explicit list of what is missing, taken to a professional for review. The second half is the part worth teaching: asking what is absent is more valuable than asking for the draft.
Steps
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Write the deal in plain language first
Paper
Who, doing what, by when, for how much, paid how, and what happens if it goes wrong or either side wants out. Plain sentences, no legal vocabulary. If you cannot state the deal plainly, you do not have one yet and no document will rescue it.
What you only learn by doing it: The what-if clauses are where students stop and where every real dispute lives. Make them write the unpleasant scenarios before anything else.
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Ask for the draft and, separately, for what is missing
OpenAI for Education Anthropic-Claude for Education
Two requests. The draft from your terms, and then: what conditions, protections or clauses should be here that are not, given this kind of arrangement. The second answer is the one worth your time.
What you only learn by doing it: Takahashi asks both in the same breath — draft this, and tell me what we should have identified beyond these terms. The gap list is what you are actually buying from the tool.
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Mark every blank, assumption and guess
Track changes or highlighter
Go through and flag everything the model supplied that you did not: a notice period, a governing-law line, an IP assignment, a payment term. Each one is either your decision or a question for counsel, and none of them is a default.
What you only learn by doing it: An unmarked generated clause is the dangerous object in this whole workflow, because it reads as settled and nobody remembers choosing it.
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Send to counsel with the question list attached
Send the draft, the plain-language terms and your flagged questions together. Review is faster and cheaper when the reviewer can see what you decided versus what you guessed.
What you only learn by doing it: Lead with the classification question if there is one. It is the issue most likely to be expensive, and the one a draft is least able to settle.
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Keep the template, keep the review step
Your business files
Once reviewed, the agreement becomes your template for similar arrangements. What must not become optional is the review when the arrangement is materially different.
What you only learn by doing it: Write on the template what it was reviewed for and when. That sentence is what stops someone reusing an intern agreement for a supplier two years later.
Where this breaks down
Nothing here produces a usable contract, and the workflow fails if students take it as doing so. It produces a draft for professional review. Drafting agreements for someone else is the practice of law; the output is a starting document and a question list, and it goes to a licensed attorney before anyone signs.
Worker classification is a legal determination, not a drafting choice. Calling someone an independent contractor in a document does not make them one. In California the ABC test under AB 5 is strict, and many roles that look like contractors — a student intern doing core work under direction, for instance — are employees as a matter of law, with wage, tax and insurance consequences. This is exactly where students most need to be told that the document does not decide the question.
Jurisdiction matters and models default to generic American boilerplate. An agreement under California law differs from one in New York, and non-compete and intellectual-property clauses in particular are treated very differently from state to state.
Do not paste a counterparty’s confidential terms into a consumer account. Use your own facts, or redact first.
If the work is unpaid and educational, the legal test for an unpaid internship is separate, strict, and not something a draft agreement satisfies.
Provenance: adapted from Fumiko Takahashi, founder of Tokyo Lollipop, interviewed in OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Pros newsletter, 14 August 2026. She drafts first-pass contractor agreements internally and is explicit about the boundary: “Creating a strong first draft internally before sending documents for professional legal review made the process far more efficient and cost-effective.” Her prompt asks not only for the draft but for what conditions are missing. The sequence, the checkpoints and the cautions below are our construction, written for a classroom. Treat the source as one practitioner’s documented experience in a vendor publication, not as evidence that this works generally.