Last Sunday and Monday I gave back-to-back “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The seminars were held at the impressive offices of the Saudi Center for Commercial Arbitration and were arranged by the Commercial Law Development Program of the U.S. Department of Commerce. My thanks to the SCCA for their gracious hospitality. My thanks also to CLDP for making … Read More
[Trigger warning: navel contemplation follows.] This morning I noticed the following two combative tweets, courtesy of @section_sign: https://twitter.com/section_sign/status/905408538738126848 Regular readers will know that I regularly invoke the marketplace of ideas. Well, is the marketplace of ideas in fact horseshit? I have nothing to say about that Tower of Babel, the broader marketplace. The marketplace in which I ply my wares—the … Read More
The fall issue of the magazine Judicature contains my article with Vice Chancellor Laster of the Delaware Court of Chancery, entitled When Contracts Seek to Preempt Judicial Discretion. Go here for a PDF copy. I leave it to others to judge the content, but I think this article gets high marks for originality in terms of the topic alone: I’ve … Read More
Most of my consulting work is for big companies. Because of economies of scale, it’s worth their while for them to hire me. But occasionally I get a different sort of consulting client. A recent example was Jonathan Feigenbaum. He’s a sole practitioner, based in Boston. Heck, he’s not even a transactional guy—he handles benefit claims. It’s awkward to ask … Read More
What, you want to know more? Read this.
Today a reader posted the following comment (found here): Ken, I have been pushing your rules about shall and must since I started drafting contracts. Recently, a colleague said that we should use must exclusively. He pointed to the following link to bolster his case: https://www.faa.gov/about/i… I wanted to point it out for your opinion. Thanks If you want to … Read More
I feel it’s my civic duty to keep you posted of Glenn West’s latest offerings. There’s his post What Is the Deal with No-Oral-Modification/Waiver Clauses? And there’s his most recent post, Avoiding the Mindless Use of the Brainless MAC Clause. Here’s the gist of the latter: In negotiating carve-outs, bear in mind that not including a carve-out for a particular circumstance when … Read More
[Updated 4 August 2017, 9:45 a.m. EDT] Yikes! This is my second update to this post. (I inserted the first update below, in the original post.) In the past 24 hours I’ve considered this issue for the first time, proposed something new, then had readers drag me in another direction. I now happily bow to the logic of those who … Read More
It was @SydneyAdams, of all people, who told me that Tesla is looking for a contracts supervisor for their delivery operations. (See the notice here.) No, she’s not thinking of applying. And no, she didn’t think it was time for her father to get a proper job. Instead, she just thought it a little odd that the job requirements didn’t … Read More
A benefit of this blog is that I get to try out new ideas. Often enough, I end up revisiting those ideas. That can make the original post out of date, but that’s a blogging fact of life. (I’m not disciplined enough to always put a link in the original post.) Here’s an example for you. In this post from … Read More
