Month: March 2017

Everything You Wanted to Know About Enumerating Attachments

Attachment-enumeration nerds—wait, does such a creature exist?—this is for you. It’s the result of my revisiting this subject after being prodded by a reader. If you have any quibbles, I’d be delighted to hear them. *** Enumerating attachments serves two functions. First, the number or letter used in referring to a particular attachment tells readers where they can expect to … Read More

Potholes on the Road to Clearer Contract Templates

It’s likely that to some degree your templates are constructed of traditional contract language, with all the confusion, wordiness, archaisms, and redundancy that entails. You want to improve your templates so they’re clearer, more concise, and better address your needs. Well, here’s how that might not happen. You assign one of your in-house lawyers to do the work. Pothole 1: … Read More

Should I Flag Changes to the Fourth Edition of MSCD?

I’m writing the preface to the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. Normally it’s where I’d describe what’s new, but there’s so much new material that listing what’s new would clog up the works. And I don’t know how helpful people would find it. In the third edition I mostly said whether a given chapter was … Read More

New Date for Charlotte “Drafting Clearer Contracts” Seminar

The date for my public “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in Charlotte, North Carolina, is now Thursday, 28 September 2017, instead of 22 September. That change was made a few weeks ago, but only now did I figure out that I hadn’t updated the “Public Seminars” page. It will be my first seminar in Charlotte. I hope to see some of … Read More

“Et Seq.”

Can’t we do better than et seq.? Here’s the Black’s Law Dictionary definition: et seq. (et sek) abbr [Latin et sequens “and the following one,” et sequentes (masc.) “and the following ones,” or et sequentia (neuter) “and the following ones”] (18c) And those (pages or sections) that follow <11 USCA §§ 101 et seq.>. And here’s an example from EDGAR: … Read More

What’s So Compelling About Commas and Legal Disputes?

Yesterday I did this post about the recent First Circuit opinion in which lack of a serial (or Oxford) comma featured prominently. That opinion prompted no end of articles in the established media (including this article in the New York Times) and no end of chatter on social media. And many of my readers rushed to tell me about it. … Read More

Why I Don’t Pin My Hopes on the Serial Comma

In an opinion issued this week, O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901, 2017 WL 957195 (1st Cir. Mar. 13, 2017) (PDF here), the First Circuit considered the meaning of the following: The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: Did “packing for shipment or distribution” refer to two kinds of packing, or did it … Read More