Comic Contracts
Comic Contracts replace dense legal prose with sequential images — literally, comic strips.
Robert de Rooy
Comic Contracts replace dense legal prose with sequential images — literally, comic strips. Robert de Rooy, a Cape Town commercial attorney, built a prize-winning Comic Contract with the help of ANB Investments (the company behind the ClemenGold citrus brand), who gave him the budget to create a complete prototype: a comic employment contract for 300 fruit pickers, all of whom signed it. He presented the comic contract at Swiss Re’s Contract Simplification Conference in Zurich in April 2016, and later that year won the Program of Visionary Change — Innovation Award at the IACCM Americas Conference in San Diego.
Influences and Origins
De Rooy traces his own influences to Louis M. Brown’s Preventive Law movement, Professor Thomas Barton’s work on contract design, and Stewart Levine’s The Book of Agreement (see Reinventing Contracts) — and credits meeting Kim at South Africa’s first Integrative Law conference, organized by Amanda Boardman Lamond, as part of his own path into this work.
A parallel effort in Western Australia
A parallel effort took root independently in Western Australia. Professor Camilla Baasch Andersen arrived at a similar idea in 2016, when engineering professor Adrian Keating asked her to help students understand a non-disclosure agreement — and wondered aloud why it couldn’t just say “don’t talk about this project until it’s done.” Andersen and Keating built a cartoon-based NDA using simple pictures and minimal dialogue, which led to Comic Book Contracts, now used across dozens of Australian organizations (Aurecon, Bankwest, and Mission Australia among them) and documented at comicbookcontracts.com.
Aurecon and Redesigning Contract
Working with Andersen, the engineering firm Aurecon converted its own employment contract into a comic book — a project John Maguire, the company’s Chief Innovation Officer (later CEO), described from the inside: turning a long, dry, fine-print contract into a series of comics forced Aurecon to notice terms that didn’t actually fit its values or culture, and to reverse-engineer the document back to what the company really wanted it to accomplish. As Kim puts it, the exercise becomes a two-way question: if a picture is worth a thousand words, which words actually need to stay, and which can become an image instead?
The results are measurable
De Rooy’s team at Creative Contracts stopped counting comic-contract sales once they passed 20,000, and he reports that comic contracts have cut employee onboarding time from four hours to forty minutes; Aurecon reports similar time savings, plus better transitions into the workplace, especially for new graduates. In a two-year study, Aurecon’s comic-format employment contract scored higher than the equivalent text-based contract on comprehension, engagement, and perception alike — and no disputes have been reported on any comic contract anywhere.
One real-world example: Tree Growers Agreement
One real-world example: Creative Contracts’ Tree Growers Agreement, created for Eneri Platforms and its outgrower tree farmers in Zambia, walks a smallholder farmer through an 18-page agreement — what’s being grown, how long the contract runs, what each party contributes, how payment and disputes work — using full-color illustrated characters and icons rather than dense legalese, with only a handful of blanks for the farmer’s own details.
Suggested Multimedia
Links & Resources
- Robert de Rooy — Creative Contracts
- Creative Contracts — Our Story
- Comic Book Contracts (Camilla Baasch Andersen, UWA)
- Camilla Andersen episode — audio version (Integrative Lawyers of the World)
- Aurecon — "Visual Employment Contract" news post
- Comic Book Contracts (Camilla Baasch Andersen, UWA)
- Camilla Andersen episode — audio version (Integrative Lawyers of the World)