I still show my contracts to my lawyer, and sometimes really fight for certain clauses, but I'm realistic: Sometimes having a signed contract is more important to me than certain categories of unlikely risk mitigation.
If you have the luxury of leverage -- the ability and willingness to walk away if the contract isn't perfect -- then yes. Hammer it out to protect your interests.
But if the contract is critical to the company's survival, then he's right: Just sign it. It's better to have an income from an imperfect contract, then no company at all because you've run out of money.
My experience is that the people who jerk you around with contracts are usually bad payers. If it's a bad contract then the prospect of income is very uncertain.
Business ultimately relies in trust, if they give you a poor contract then it is a strong reason not to trust them over anything.
I went back and forth with one client for about five months on a contract worth about $300k.
They actually started PAYING me on milestones well before the contract was signed. We didn't nail down a final version until just before the last milestone payment.
They paid in full, no delays -- they even paid extra for when they wanted additional changes out of scope. In my industry (games), it's actually quite common to start work on a contract before it's signed.
They were a rather large company, granted. But yes, don't DO a lot of work for someone you neither trust nor have a solid contract with.
If the contract allows them to weasel out of giving you any money at all after you've put significant time and resources into it, then that would be qualify as "I sometimes really fight for certain clauses". Ownership of IP is another critical nonnegotiable for me: If I have a library that I own and I'm using it in someone's product, it's going to be spelled out in the contract that I still own it (work for hire notwithstanding), or I'm not signing.
But if you're talking about unbalanced boilerplate legalese (nonreciprocal indemnification or nondisclosure, or clauses that otherwise aren't ideal according to your legal counsel), then I still agree with the article.
If you have the luxury of leverage -- the ability and willingness to walk away if the contract isn't perfect -- then yes. Hammer it out to protect your interests.
But if the contract is critical to the company's survival, then he's right: Just sign it. It's better to have an income from an imperfect contract, then no company at all because you've run out of money.