The image below contains the text of an email message I received from a law student yesterday.
In case it’s of interest, here’s how I responded:
Hi [Name]. Fortunate is the author who gets this sort of message from a reader! Now that you’re on the road to being an informed consumer of contract language, I offer the following suggestions:
Being an informed consumer of contract language is necessary if you want to be competent in your work with contracts, but it’s not sufficient. For one thing, the focus is on how to say clearly and concisely in a contract whatever you want to say—it doesn’t address what to say. In other words, you have to acquire deal knowledge. A good place to start is by becoming familiar with issue relating to boilerplate. You might find helpful my hyperlinked list of my writings on boilerplate, here.
But that doesn’t capture the magnitude of the challenge. We’re stuck in the copy-and-paste system, endlessly recycling dysfunction. To escape it, we need a quality source of customizable contract language. That’s what Adams Contracts is trying to build, and apparently no one other than me has the appetite or the chops for that task. For more about the nature of this challenge, see this 2024 blog post.
I wish you all the best in your career. It seems to me that you’re off to a good start!
Ken
