In MSCD 3.47, I say the following: For purposes of business contracts, as opposed to statutes, it’s unlikely that anyone could successfully argue that instead of expressing an obligation, a particular shall is “discretionary” and means may or should. Well, courtesy of @mrsalzwedel I learned of PacifiCorp v. Sempra Energy Trading Corp., No. CIV-04-0701 (E.D. Cal. 2 July 2004), an opinion … Read More
Thanks to this update on LinkedIn by lawyer Alexander Tyulkanov, I saw this GE Report, entitled “Honey, I Shrunk The Contract: How Plain English Is Helping GE Keep Its Business Humming.” It describes how GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions unit replaced their seven bloated and archaic templates, each a hundred pages plus, with a five-page plain-English contract. It’s a great story. It reflects what … Read More
Here are the first two sentences of the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, as I currently imagine them: This manual offers guidelines for clear and concise contract language. If you’re making decisions regarding contract language without consulting it, odds are you’re copy-and-pasting, relying on flimsy conventional wisdom, or improvising. I hear you saying to yourselves, … Read More
[Updated 9 March 2017: Thank you all, but I now have all the volunteers I can handle.] OK, girls and boys, it’s time to start the process of publishing the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. The first part of that process is having some brave souls crawl over the manuscript looking for problems big and … Read More
