Today I saw the following @matt_levine tweet: How lawyers say "midnight." http://t.co/2fZJUY9NBa pic.twitter.com/osjP0ItCd5 — Matt Levine (@matt_levine) March 16, 2015 The number of retweets confirms that there’s train-wreck fascination in convoluted lawyer prose. Midnight is the boundary between the last second of one day and the first second of the next day, so every day has a midnight at each end. … Read More
Although it won’t see the light of day for at least another year, my attention is turning to the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. Compared with the difference between the first edition and the second edition, and the difference between the second edition and the third edition, the fourth edition won’t represent as dramatic an upgrade. … Read More
I’m at the end of a whirlwind trip to China. Five seminars in eight days—Beijing, Shanghai, then Beijing again. The impetus for the trip was public seminars in Beijing and Shanghai. I was invited to give the seminars by Simon Huang, through his company SiS Conference Consulting. Simon organizes high-end legal and business training events. He’s very efficient, resourceful, and knowledgeable. … Read More
Having written an article on represents and warrants, I had to find a home for it. That caused me to consider again the whole business of submitting articles to journals run by law-school students. It also caused me to consider the significance attributed to publishing in law reviews. A Prestige-Driven System Academics have long groused about law reviews. As far … Read More
The dates and cities for my 2015 public “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars in the U.S. for West LegalEdcenter have been on the “Public Seminars” page of this site for a few weeks, but I thought it best to make that information a little more conspicuous. So here it is: OPEN FOR REGISTRATION April 2, 2015, Nashville, TN May 7, 2015, Chicago, … Read More
My 15 April and 16 April “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars in Zurich are fast approaching. They will be my only seminars in Continental Europe this year. For more information, go here.
You might recall that one of the rationales for use of the phrase represents and warrants is that it allows you to specify what remedies are available, namely an action under the contract for breach of warranty, a tort action for misrepresentation, or both. In an as-yet-unpublished article, I demonstrate that using represents or warrants or both doesn’t make sense. I go on to … Read More
Recently I was on the panel for a live webcast—you know, with panelists joining in by telephone and everyone looking at PowerPoint slides on their screens. I didn’t exactly cover myself with glory. Partway through, the battery on my cordless phone expired—thankfully not while I was speaking. I thought it would be safest to call back in on an ancient … Read More
At my recent “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in San Francisco, a participant asked me what I thought of use of the phrase knowingly, voluntarily, and intentionally in waivers of jury trial, as in the following EDGAR example (I converted it from all caps to spare you having your eyeballs explode): The borrowers hereby knowingly, voluntarily, intentionally and irrevocably waive all … Read More
If you think of yourself as a committed member of the digerati, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, by Nicholas Carr, might give you pause. Carr shows that as much as automation enriches our lives, it can also impoverish. For example, he describes how all-encompassing flight automation appears to have resulted in a “deskilling” of pilots, leading to a new type of aviation … Read More
