Designing and Negotiating Agreements in a Digitalized Era – a qualitative analysis

Digitalization is a reality that governs more and more both the society and the economy, facilitating new and more efficient ways of setting up business and business collaborations. Rational agreement routines and well thought through contracts help organizations to avoid legal disputes and thus maintain long-term relations with customers and suppliers. Therefore, a digitalized platform where non-lawyers (purchasers, sellers) in a user-friendly interface can draft individual contracts without lawyers is expected to both increase the companies’ labor productivity and to facilitate the evaluation of risks and opportunities over time. To our knowledge, there is very little known about the agreement routines and the firms’ interest of making them more efficient using digital solutions. Based on semi-structured interviews that we carried out in Sweden during the autumn 2019, we found that companies and authorities are not fully in control of their agreements, when it comes to for example the origin of the agreements, the agreement routines, the storage of agreement and authorized signatures and do not fully use the potential of digital tools for managing and negotiating contracts. Unexpectedly, organizations seem to be of the opinion that the current, a little bit unmodern, system actually works for them. Therefore, new digital tools and/or digital platforms must really meet the needs of the organizations to correspond to the investment for it. Our interviews suggest that new simple digital solutions might be appreciated and used.