Legal Certainty in Digital Commercial Contracting: A Quantitative Contract-Level Study in the Ecuadorian Context

Legal certainty is a central condition of commercial exchange, yet its relationship with contractual digitalization remains insufficiently specified in business-to-business settings. This study examined how the degree of contractual digitalization was associated with legal certainty in intercompany commercial relations in Ecuador. A contract-level dataset of 160 commercial contracts was analyzed using descriptive statistics, Spearman correlation, MANOVA, robust OLS regression, binary logistic regression, principal component analysis, k-means clustering, and bootstrap resampling. A digitalization gradient was observed across the sample. Digitalization levels were associated with evidentiary support, legal risk, legal certainty, formal-dispute prevalence, and contingency-resolution times. The most pronounced monotonic association linked digitalization with legal certainty (Spearman’s ρ = 0.8379, p < 0.001). In the adjusted OLS model, digitalization level was associated with a 14.90-point difference in legal certainty per unit increase, while the adjusted logistic model showed lower odds of formal dispute at higher digitalization levels. Unsupervised analyses identified two broad contract profiles corresponding to lower- and higher-certainty digital environments, and bootstrap results indicated stability of the principal estimates. These findings should be interpreted as correlational evidence derived from a contract-level, non-probabilistic sample of Ecuadorian commercial contracts, and not as causal or nationally representative conclusions.