Archive for August, 2010



Koncision CA Editorial Boards

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

You’ve presumably seen this blog post announcing Koncision Contract Automation. I could have waited until Koncision CA was ready for launch before announcing, but I have two reasons for announcing now. One, I want to have the benefit of input from potential users. And two, I want to recruit two editorial boards; that’s what I [...]

Some Features of Koncision Contract Automation

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

In the coming months we’ll be establishing the framework and policies of Koncision Contract Automation. The document-assembly engine that will power it, ContractExpress, operates as you’d expect: users answer a questionnaire, and based on the answers provided the system then compiles and adjusts the preloaded contract language. But beyond that, there’s plenty of room for [...]

Announcing Koncision Contract Automation

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

I’m pleased to announce that I’m partnering with Business Integrity, developer of ContractExpress document-assembly software, to develop Koncision Contract Automation, an online subscription-based service that will make available to lawyers document-assembly templates for business contracts. We’ll be launching our first product, a line of confidentiality agreement templates, in the first quarter of 2011. This development [...]

Contract Drafting and Plagiarism

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

There’s been quite a bit of blogosphere chatter recently about lawyers and plagiarism. The most recent salvo is this post by Peter Friedman, who teaches legal analysis and writing at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. In my cloistered way, I pay real attention only when the discussion touches on contract drafting. And here’s [...]

Signature Automation: A Dispatch from the Front Lines

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

I recently received the following inquiry from longtime reader John “Fitz” Fitzpatrick: Pardon me if I missed a blog discussion on e-signature (have you had one?), but recently a bunch of companies have requested that we sign our contracts with them using e-signature through a company called EchoSign. Nice idea in principle, but I have [...]

Innovation Is Easier If You Get Specific

Monday, August 16th, 2010

I noted with interest this article on the website of the Association for Corporate Counsel. It’s entitled “Top Ten Innovations to Improve Enterprise-Wide Contract Management,” and it’s by Nancy Jessen and Bret Baccus of Huron Consulting Group. (Nancy was kind enough to be on the panel for the seventh in my series of “Drafting Clearer Contracts” [...]

Don’t Count on the Courts to Fix Your Mistakes

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Drafting mistakes are mainly of interest to me for the lessons I can deduce about how not to draft; I don’t particularly care how the mess is cleaned up. But sometimes I’ll pause to examine the wreckage. In that spirit, I recently read this article by Alison Frankel for the American Lawyer. It describes as follows [...]

Revisiting the Outsourcing of Law-Firm Contract Drafting

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Last week the New York Times ran two stories on legal outsourcing. The first (click here), by Heather Timmons, describes the growth of legal outsourcing in India. The second (click here) is a “City Room” blog item by John Eligon; in it, two BigLaw partners offer differing takes on outsourcing. I’ve written on this topic previously, but [...]

You Have to Read the Contract

Monday, August 9th, 2010

I happened upon this blog post by Susan Wilson of Alston+Bird regarding a recent Delaware Chancery Court opinion, Cambridge North Point LLC v. Boston and Maine Corporation. B&M argued that the court should hold the contract at issue unenforceable because B&M had signed the contact “without noticing” a new provision added to a draft by Cambridge. [...]

A Redundancy Found in “Efforts” Provisions

Friday, August 6th, 2010

It’s commonplace for a contract to require a party to use efforts (reasonable efforts or some suboptimal variant) to accomplish something to the extent possible (using those words or words to that effect). The notion of to the extent possible is redundant, as it’s implicit in an efforts provision that the party under the obligation [...]

On Typos in Contract Drafting

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

The ever-vigilant Steven Sholk told me about this post on Footnoted. It describes how in an exhibit to an employment agreement filed on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system, the company undertook that in addition to paying the executive’s moving expenses, “in consideration of other relocation expenses that Executive and his family will [...]

What’s Your Experience with “Most Favored Nation” Provisions?

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Some months ago a reader asked the following: At some point down the road, can you do a blog posting on Most Favored Nation clauses?  My feeling is that within the last 2-3 decades, some professor in some business school somewhere wrote an article on how important these clauses are. Current CEOs, CFOs, and procurement leaders [...]