Archive for June, 2008
Monday, June 30th, 2008
On July 17 I’ll be in Seattle giving my West Legalworks seminar. Afterwards, starting at 5:00 p.m., I’ll be meeting a few friends for drinks at the restaurant Sazerac, at 1101 Fourth Avenue, at the corner of Spring Street. It’s a few blocks from the Grand Hyatt, where the seminar is being held. If you’re in [...]
Posted in News | 1 Comment »
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Maybe it’s sunspots. Or something in the water. At any rate, another second edition of a book related to contract drafting has just been published. This time it’s Charles Fox’s Working with Contracts: What Law School Doesn’t Teach You. (Click here to go to the Amazon page. Note that Amazon’s a little confused, in that the cover [...]
Posted in News | 2 Comments »
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Normally I wouldn’t dream of going public with thoughts on writing in general. A vast number of people have busied themselves with that topic, so there’s no chance of my having anything novel to say. I regularly give thanks to the gods of writing that I’ve been given the near-virgin territory of contract drafting to [...]
Posted in Odds and Ends | 9 Comments »
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
Once in a long while I see a template contract that uses Word’s line-numbering feature to include line numbering in the left margin of each page. The idea, obviously, it to allow anyone involved in drafting or negotiating a contract based on the template to pinpoint language at issue—Let’s strike the word “material” on page 46, [...]
Posted in Process | 5 Comments »
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
I said in this blog post that I planned to do a post about Deal Proof. Well, here it is. Deal Proof is a Thomson West product; click here to go to the relevant page of the Thomson West website. It’s a document-analysis and proofreading tool that many of the big firms subscribe to. It [...]
Posted in Process | 5 Comments »
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
FYI, I’ll be on the panel for a CLE session at the ABA 2008 annual meeting, which is being held in New York. The topic is “Getting the Business Deal into the Contract—Choosing the Right Words.” It’s being held at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, August 8. Also on the panel will be Tina Stark, professor [...]
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Monday, June 23rd, 2008
In this post I described how I had heard someone cite by name some companies and one law firm—a multi-office U.S. law firm—that had foresworn use of shall. Well, recently I had the privilege of giving a series of seminars at that law firm, and I was tickled to be able to ask two senior [...]
Posted in Categories of Contract Language | 7 Comments »
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
If you say that something has to be satisfactory to Acme, the standard might be an objective one, in that it would be met if a reasonable person in Acme’s position would be satisfied. Alternatively, it could mean that Acme actually has to be satisfied, subject only to the implied duty of good faith—the standard [...]
Posted in Select Usages | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Law firms could take a number of steps to put their contract drafting on a more rational footing. They could adopt a contract-drafting “house style” that recommends usages to employ and usages to steer clear of. They could offer rigorous training. And they could implement a centralized template initiative, maybe even one that makes use [...]
Posted in Process | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
West Legalworks would like me to do webinars for them. I’m open to the idea. I could do a series based on MSCD—maybe eight one-hour webinars. They’d be done live and then would be available on demand. Would doing MSCD webinars cause me to lose seminar business? I don’t think so. If you come to [...]
Posted in Odds and Ends | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
I’m back after a three-week break from blogging. I’m not exactly refreshed, as I was traveling hither and yon doing seminars and, during down time, reviewing page proofs of the second edition of MSCD. I have a relatively tranquil summer ahead of me, so I’ll be recharging my batteries, mainly by turning to man-about-the-house duties that [...]
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Sunday, June 1st, 2008
With age, birthdays become less important, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that on the second anniversary of this blog (give or take a few days) I’m less inclined to wax lyrical than I was after the first anniversary. But a few stray thoughts come to mind: I pay little attention to my blog’s [...]
Posted in News | 2 Comments »
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
Such as is ambiguous—it might be unclear whether the clause it introduces serves to reduce the scope of the class represented by the preceding noun. This can result in contract disputes. Consider the following sentence: Richard collects books about painters such as Botticelli and Donatello. Given the general nature of the class in question (painters) [...]
Posted in Select Usages | 1 Comment »
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
This past Friday and Saturday I was in Atlanta, at Emory Law School’s conference on “Teaching Drafting and Transactional Skills: The Basics and Beyond.” (Click here to go to the relevant page of Emory Law School’s website.) The conference was organized by Tina Stark, an Emory professor and the executive director of the school’s new Center [...]
Posted in Odds and Ends | No Comments »
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
In MSCD 8.55 I recommend that you steer clear of and/or unless using it would spare you some verbiage. Well, consider the following basis for terminating an employee for cause: the Employee is charged with any crime that (1) is punishable by a custodial penalty, instead of or in addition to any fine or other [...]
Posted in Select Usages | 9 Comments »
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
A couple of months ago, reader Kent asked me what I thought about using parentheses in contracts. Here, belatedly, is my answer: In regular prose, parentheses (namely round brackets, like those enclosing these words) are used to offset text that constitutes an explanation or aside. The limited and stylized prose of contracts is generally not [...]
Posted in Select Usages | 2 Comments »