[Revised January 9, 2013, to make my point a little clearer and to trim away some invective.]

Thomson Reuters has announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Practical Law Company, “the London-based provider of practical legal know-how and workflow tools to law firms and corporate law departments.” Go here for the announcement.

Apparently, PLC has locked up the market in the UK, and it has done very well in the U.S. since arriving here around 2008.

But a couple of years ago, after cadging a free password, I had a look at a PLC confidentiality-agreement template.

PLC does a good business allowing BigLaw to outsource general analytical work. But based on what I’ve seen, it simply gives BigLaw the kind of product that BigLaw lawyers would cobble together if they had the time and inclination. No surprise there—after all, PLC is staffed by BigLaw refugees. (And to its credit, it also has @ContractAdviser.)

So PLC’s contract templates don’t follow a style guide. Instead, they use traditional contract language, with all the shortcomings that entails.

And when I last checked, they weren’t using technology comparable to ContractExpress.

And the analysis contained in their NDA template was nowhere near as complete that provided in the questionnaire for Koncision’s template.

Mind you, I’m keenly aware that one doesn’t want to make perfect the enemy of the good. If PLC allows you to be more efficient in creating standard product, there might well be an advantage to using PLC. And I have no alternative to offer, part from Koncision’s confidentiality-agreement template.

But I have the luxury of thinking not in terms of what is, but what should be. As I’ve said quite often, originally in this 2010 post, there’s no reason to settle for “good enough” for purposes of commoditized contract drafting.

(If you think that PLC’s approach to preparing contract templates has changed markedly in the past couple of years, let me know. By way of full disclosure, I had some preliminary conversations with PLC in 2008.)