Why every contract we write protects both sides from the first draft

Twenty-four centuries ago, a teacher named Protagoras trained a student named Euathlus and made him an unusual deal. Euathlus would pay his tuition once he won his first court case. It was a fair arrangement on paper. Both men expected it to work in their favour eventually.

Years passed. Euathlus finished his training and never took a case. He had no reason to. As long as he never argued in court, the payment never came due. Protagoras, running out of patience, sued him for the fee, and he did it certain he would win either way.

His reasoning was simple. If the court ruled in his favour, Euathlus would have to pay by the ruling itself. If the court ruled in Euathlus's favour, Euathlus would still have to pay, because winning that case meant he had won his first case, exactly as their original agreement required.

Euathlus, defending himself, made the same argument in reverse. If he won the case, he owed nothing by the court's decision. If he lost, he still owed nothing, because losing meant he had not yet won his first case, and the original deal had not been triggered.

The contract was written with such precision that both outcomes led back to the same unresolved question. Historians still disagree on how the case was actually settled. What survives is the structure of the problem itself, a document engineered so tightly around one side's advantage that it eventually trapped both parties in it.

What the paradox means for the contracts we write

We think about this story every time we draft an agreement with a clinic. Not because we want to win in every scenario, the way Protagoras tried to. The opposite. We use it as a reminder of what a contract becomes when it is written to serve one side's interests instead of the relationship itself.

A contract like that does not stay stable. It works exactly as intended right up until circumstances change, and then it turns into a dispute nobody actually wants to have.

So every clause in our agreements is built from the first draft to work for both sides, not amended later once a problem has already appeared. We define, before anything is signed, what happens if either side needs to step back early. We define what has already been delivered, what has already been committed to on the client's behalf, and how that gets resolved if the relationship ends sooner than planned.

A case from our own history

Back when we still worked only with clients in Russia, before BRANDAY existed in Dubai, we had a client end an engagement early. By that point we had already committed to venues and collaborators for the campaign's coming weeks, arrangements made in good faith on the client's behalf.

We closed everything out properly. We gave every partner involved a respectful, timely notice rather than leaving them to find out on their own. This industry is small, in Russia and in the UAE alike, and reputations travel further than any single contract ever will.

That decision cost us more in the short term than a stricter approach would have. We made it anyway, because the alternative was protecting a fee at the expense of every relationship the fee was meant to fund in the first place.

How this shapes the way we work now

We do not treat contract terms as a negotiation to win. We treat them as the first piece of strategy work we do for a clinic, the same discipline we later apply to a marketing plan or a call centre script. Clear from the outset. Built to hold up when circumstances change, not just when everything goes as expected.

A contract that only protects one side is not a contract. It is a trap with a signature on it, and eventually someone has to live inside it.