Lawyers write contracts for a living. They still wouldn't sign mine

When I was building Actionstep — a legal practice management platform — my market was law firms. Which meant most of my deals were with lawyers.
Joint ventures, product trials, distribution partnerships, pre-sales engagements. I was doing a lot of them, and I needed a fast way to get things formalised without slowing everything down.
The obvious answer — formal engagement contracts — turned out to be the worst one.
Lawyers, of all people, hated signing them. Not because they didn't understand them. Because they understood them too well. A formal contract meant scrutiny, redlines, their own legal team getting involved, weeks of back and forth. Even for a simple product trial.
Verbal agreements weren't the answer either. Not because they aren't binding — they often are — but because you can't prove what was said when things go sideways.
So I worked out what I actually needed: something both parties would sign without hesitation, that clearly captured what we'd agreed, in plain language anyone could read in two minutes.
A simple MOU. One or two pages. No jargon. Just: here's what we each intend, here's what we're committing to, sign here.
The same lawyers who'd balk at a formal contract would sign an MOU the same day. I think the reason is simple: it just reflected the conversation we'd already had. It didn't introduce anything new or alarming. It was hard to object to something that just said, in plain English, what you'd both just agreed to out loud.
I also gave them an out: I'd always offer to follow up with a formal agreement later, and told them the MOU would inform it. That made hesitant parties comfortable — they weren't giving up their right to something more rigorous, they were just getting started.
Here's the thing though: they almost never asked for it.
Partly because drafting a formal agreement is a lot of work nobody wants to do. But mostly, I think, because the MOU was already doing the job. It had captured what mattered. Both parties knew what they'd agreed to. There was nothing left to formalise.
And in the few cases where something did go wrong? The MOU resolved it almost instantly. Because it was so clear, there was nothing to interpret. A dense formal agreement would have meant lawyers reviewing lawyers' work, arguing over clauses, running up bills. The MOU just said what we'd agreed — and that was that.
That pattern taught me something: people don't actually need complex agreements. They need clarity and a record. The formal contract is often just anxiety in legal clothing.
The more I used this approach, the more I noticed the same thing everywhere: most agreement problems aren't legal problems. They're clarity problems. Two parties think they've agreed, start working, and discover they had completely different pictures of what was happening.
By the time that surfaces, it's too late. The relationship is strained. The scope has crept. Someone has worked for free.
The fix isn't a better contract. It's a better conversation — captured simply, signed by both sides, before work starts.
That realisation eventually became the seed of a new product. But I'm curious whether this resonates here — particularly those doing client work or partnerships. How do you handle the space between a handshake and a formal contract?