From Weeks to Hours: How 10 Years and AI Changed the Way I Write Contracts

Roughly 10 years ago, after years of feedback from clients and staff, I sat down to draft a new service agreement for our property management company. It was long overdue. The first draft alone took a week of focused work. The final version? Months of back-and-forth collaboration, refining everything from operations to legal language to client experience.

At the time, I was the COO, and every operational issue eventually made its way to my desk. I started to notice a pattern—many of the biggest problems could be traced back to misunderstandings in our client agreements. Some were minor. Others were costly. All pointed to the same root cause: our contract no longer fit the business we had become.

So I left the office for a few days—literally. I cleared my calendar and went heads-down on the research. I read the Real Estate Act and the Residential Tenancy Act, pored over competitor agreements, and dug through notes from countless client and staff conversations. That first draft became a foundation for what eventually turned into a rock-solid agreement that supported our next phase of growth.

Fast forward to today: I just drafted a brand-new agreement—in a single day.

It’s not that I worked faster. It’s that I’m working differently. This time, I had three major advantages:

1. A blank slate. I’m building a new business model, so I’m not tied to old structures or legacy language.

2. A decade of experience. Ten more years of hands-on operations, legal conversations, client friction points, and process improvement.

3. ChatGPT. Not to write it for me—but to help me work better.

To be clear, the AI didn’t create the agreement. What it did was something even more valuable: synthesize, summarize, and reword the ideas I gave it—instantly. That’s its real power. With the right input, it saves hours of grunt work and lets me stay focused on structure, clarity, and what matters most.

But tools are just tools. Without lived experience, I would’ve missed the nuances—the way regulatory frameworks actually work in practice, the subtle ways clients misinterpret clauses, and the operational consequences of unclear expectations.

That’s where human judgment still leads. I’ll be running this draft past business partners, ideal clients, and of course, a lawyer.

The real win here isn’t speed—it’s clarity. Ten years ago, I wrote a contract to fix a problem. Today, I’m writing one to build something better from the start.