I just wrapped up my 2012 series of Geneva seminars. Some impressions: I’d be hard pressed to find a more congenial arrangement. I’m staying in Vieille Ville, the old part of Geneva, with my brother Charles and his family. (To the right is part of the view from Charles’s apartment.) To get to Akin Gump’s offices, where the seminars were … Read More
Today I’d like to advance a simple but ill-understood concept: A time of day isn’t a period of time. Instead, it’s a boundary between the period of time that comes before and the period of time that comes after. So if a contract states that a given deadline is midnight at the end of March 13, 2012, the deadline will … Read More
See this post on Language Log for how Judge Richard Posner did more than reach for the nearest dictionary in order to determine the meaning of “harboring.” Posner’s approach comes as a breath of fresh air, given the tendency of judges to rely unduly on dictionaries. That’s something I noted in this 2011 post, and it’s at the heart of … Read More
I currently find myself wrestling with what might seem interstitial stuff. It falls within “the part versus the whole”—my umbrella term for uncertainty over which members of a group you’re referring to. Consider the following: If Acme breaks a Widget [Is this conditional clause satisfied if Acme breaks more than one Widget? Presumably, so: if Acme breaks two Widgets, that … Read More
I’ve uploaded a new version of the confidentiality-agreement template. It reflects the following not-earth-shattering changes: @bradleybclark pointed out that in one bit of questionnaire guidance I had repeated a few words a few words. Thanks to another user, I learned that in one integrated definition the defined-term parenthetical was missing the closing quotation marks and closing parenthesis. (When you’re dealing … Read More
In this December 2011 post I wrote about a contract dispute caused by uncertainty over what the phrase “said cost” referred to. On further reflection, I realized that we were dealing with a kind of ambiguity that I hadn’t written about previously. To get a better sense of the basis of that ambiguity, I contacted Geoff Pullum, co-editor of my … Read More
In this recent post I wrote about how customers can be an obstacle to change. But inertia has been on my mind more generally, too. I’ve come to the conclusion that if an organization knows only traditional contract language and the copy-and-paste process, rational arguments won’t be enough to coax them into change. More specifically, I’ve found that providing an … Read More
Given that traditional contract language is confusing for native English speakers, it stands to reason that translating contracts from or into English would be a problematic undertaking. That’s something I wrote about in this article for the Bulletin of the Institute of Translation & Interpreting. (Hey, I’d find a way to get an article on contract drafting in any periodical!) … Read More
