Formal contracts provide valuable information about how parties work together to achieve their goals. Yet few scholars in public administration and management systematically examine the different elements of contract design to understand contract variations. Often the potential for collaboration success (and failure) lies in what is included and what is omitted from the written form. Collaboration success can often hinge on slight differences in language. In this paper we demonstrate how the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) developed by Crawford and Ostrom (1995) can be applied to better understand how contracts structure relationships between various parties. We also show how the data obtained using the IGT can be incorporated into regression analyses to answer broader governance questions.