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Law as a profession has much in common with architecture and engineering. In contexts as diverse as business transactions, legislative work, and mediation, lawyers have been called legal architects or engineers. We propose seeing contracts as things or artefacts–something to be designed–and borrowing from architects and engineers the idea of design patterns: solutions to recurring problems. Our examples illustrate how design patterns may relate to contract forms, templates, or clauses, but also go way beyond. The paper concludes with an agenda for an open design pattern library for contracts, seeking to help share examples and best practices that enable better contract design and communication.