Month: November 2012

Rescheduled D.C. and New York City “Drafting Clearer Contracts” Seminars

Thanks to Sandy, we had to reschedule my Washington, D.C. and New York City “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars for West LegalEdcenter. They’re now being held on Wednesday, December 5 (Washington, D.C.) and Friday, December 7 (New York City). And the San Francisco seminar will be on Tuesday, December 11, as scheduled. For more information, go here.

A Case Study in Eliminating a String of Nouns from a Contract

Consider the following (emphasis added): This agreement is personal to the Employee. The Employee shall not assign any of the Employee’s rights or delegate any of the Employee’s obligations under this agreement to any other person, except that the Employee may assign the Employee’s rights under this agreement to the Employee’s personal or legal representatives, executors, administrators, heirs, distributees, devisees … Read More

Description and Prescription in Contract Drafting

Linguists and English-usage types have long engaged in a back-and-forth regarding the extent to which it’s appropriate for English usage to be subject to “rules.” On one side are descriptivists; on the other, prescriptivists. Here’s how journalist Robin Lane Greene described the tussle in a recent New York Times debate with Bryan Garner: Welcome to another round of the Language … Read More

The Index to MSCD3

I’ve finished compiling the index for the third edition of MSCD. It’s fairly long—it occupies 22 pages of a single-spaced, single-column Word document. Perhaps by way of rationalizing the work involved, I offer the following observations: A sure sign of a dubious reference work is a skimpy index. And a sure way to compromise an index is for the author to … Read More

Another Categories-of-Contract-Language Oddity: “Will Be Expected To”

There seems to be no end to the bizarro verb structures that drafters opt for. Today I saw the following in a contract: “Consultant will be expected to perform the Services.” I said to myself, WTF! I promptly went on the SEC’s EDGAR system, where I had no trouble finding instances of will be expected to. It occurs in 289 … Read More