Ken Adams

What I do bears little relation to traditional law-school legal-writing programs, which teach writing for litigation—research memos, appellate briefs, and the like. Nevertheless, I had a look at the recent U.S. News rankings of legal-writing programs. (In addition to ranking U.S. law schools overall, U.S. News also ranks them for purposes of ten specialties, including legal writing.) What you notice … Read More

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a fervent booster of using document assembly to draft contracts. I keep banging on that drum for two reasons: First, document assembly represents the only way to put mainstream contract drafting on a rational footing in terms of economics and quality. And second, every so often I see a clear sign … Read More

On a flight home from London on Sunday, I started reading The Stories of English, by David Crystal. Published in 2004, it’s a well-received, and well-rounded, study of the history of the English language. Perhaps not an obvious choice for airplane reading, but perfect for me, since it marries, in the opening chapters, my interests in language and in early … Read More

In any given contract, the signature block for a legal entity will routinely contain two signature lines rather than just one. Why have two people sign for one party? I suspect that in most or all contexts it’s because the organizational documents for that entity require that two officers sign all contracts, or contracts worth more than a stated amount. … Read More

The word signatory is ambiguous. Black’s Law Dictionary defines signatory as “A party that signs a document, personally or through an agent, and thereby becomes a party to an agreement.” But it’s also used to mean someone who physically signs a contract, whether as a party or on behalf of party. For example, after “Title” under the contract signature line … Read More

Here’s a usage I haven’t written about before: placing under the contract signature block of an corporation, below the signature line, the notation I have authority to bind the corporation. Some wrinkles: When a signature block provides for two signatures, the notation is in the plural: We have authority to bind the corporation. Sometimes corporation is given a capital C, but … Read More

I’ve long read the Strategic Legal Technology blog by Ron Friedmann. Ron has spent most of the last two decades in legal technology, but recently he has shifted his focus to legal outsourcing, becoming SVP Marketing for Integreon. In his blog, he writes about innovation, or the lack of it, in the legal profession generally. It crossed my mind that chatting … Read More

Today I heard from a client with an interesting proposition. They had wanted me to do my day-long “Contract Drafting—Language and Layout” seminar as part of a week-long program for their global contracts personnel, but due to the economic downturn they’ve had to postpone the program. Would I be willing instead to do my presentation in the form of a … Read More

In the current edition of New York magazine, someone agitating about Facebook’s new terms of service is quoted as saying “No Latin! I’m not sure what forum non conveniens means, and I shouldn’t have to [know].” As a general principle, No Latin! makes sense to me. I’ve found on the SEC’s EDGAR system contracts filed in the past year that contain … Read More

A chapter of MSCD is devoted to syntactic ambiguity, in other words uncertainty over which part of a sentence a given word or phrase modifies. One source of syntactic ambiguity is closing modifiers. MSCD discusses how to avoid ambiguity caused by closing modifiers, but it doesn’t discuss in each case (or the wordier in each such case). That’s what I’ll … Read More