At the recent ACC annual meeting, Adrian Goss—whom I first met a dozen years ago on a trip to Australia—told me he had uploaded some miscellaneous-provisions stuff from Practical Law and asked ChatGPT to redraft it so it complies with the guidelines in A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. In this 2023 blog post, I discuss the notion of … Read More
I saw discussion on LinkedIn about whether one might use metrics to assess training in contract drafting. Here’s why I think that ain’t happening. How to Say Clearly and Concisely What You Want to Say in a Contract First, what’s meant by training in contract drafting? Let’s assume it refers to the kind of training I offer—training in how to … Read More
In this post from a few months ago, I wrote about doing my first in-person Drafting Clearer Contracts presentation in four years. It involved little in the way of travel—just taking the Long Island Rail Road to Manhattan. But since then, I’ve done two out-of-town gigs. This is about one I did recently. It was for a group of around … Read More
Alé Dalton, a healthcare partner at the Nashville office of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP, saw fit to do a LinkedIn post about A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. And I reckon it’s the most engaging and digestible take on MSCD since, well, forever! It’s in the form of a carousel—a series of images you click through. Check it … Read More
I left Twitter in 2023. That was an easy decision—it had become a Nazi bar under the auspices of a billionaire man-child. After a couple of false starts, last month I found an agreeable Twitter alternative—Bluesky. Although Jack Dorsey, then Twitter CEO, was involved in the early days of Bluesky (in 2019), an appealing aspect of Bluesky is that becoming … Read More
[Updated 11 September 2024: I’ve been fiddling with what article headings to use and moving sections around. I expect that will continue for a bit!] You’re drafting a contract that’s big enough for you to group sections into articles, so the contract is easier to navigate. What do you call the boilerplate at the back? “Boilerplate” would be too cryptic … Read More
Twice previously, I’ve critiqued articles written by three cognitive-sciences co-authors, Eric Martinez, Frank Mollica, and Edward Gibson. This 2022 blog post considers their article that aims to show that contracts are poorly written. That article tells us nothing we don’t already know. And this 2023 blog post considers their article examining why lawyers write in such a convoluted way. Because … Read More
This week tipster extraordinaire Glenn West mentioned to me an opinion of the England and Wales Court of Appeal, Cantor Fitzgerald & Co v. Yes Bank Limited [2024] EWCA Civ 695. This case involves syntactic ambiguity—confusion over what modifies what. I’ve written at length about syntactic ambiguity, and the lesson for drafters is always basically the same, so I thought … Read More
I noted with interest this post on LinkedIn by Scott Simmons, a business-development coach. Scott kicks the post off by saying, “We need to talk about perfect. The legal profession has a problem with perfectionism.” But Scott’s post isn’t actually about perfectionism. Instead, it’s about lawyers being bad at “dealing with mistakes or setbacks.” You don’t have to be a … Read More
Next week, on Monday and Tuesday, 11 and 12 June 2024, I’m doing a Drafting Clearer Contracts online presentation, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:10 p.m. ET (US). Go here for more information. The fee is US$495, but if you’re a lawyer at a law firm with up to three lawyers, if you’re a contract manager, if you’re in government, if … Read More
