As one of their assignments, last week my students at Notre Dame Law School analyzed the verb structures in the “SOW terms & conditions agreement” that goes with Cisco’s advanced services statement of work (here). Obviously, I had to perform an analysis of my own. One thing that caught my eye was use of nor shall in the following: The receiving party shall at all times … Read More
Greetings from South Bend, Indiana! I’m in the middle of teaching an “intensive” three-week course on contract drafting at Notre Dame Law School. Given that we’re cramming one semester’s worth of work into the course, for me it’s living up to its name, even with a small group of students—I feel like I’ll need a vacation when I’m done. As for … Read More
Here’s a list of where and when in 2015 I’ll be doing public “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars in the U.S. for West LegalEdcenter: February 20, San Francisco, CA (information here, but clicking once takes you to the wrong page; click “Back” then click on the link again to go to the right page) March 19, Houston, TX April 2, Nashville, TN … Read More
In previous years, I’ve occasionally moaned on this blog about how I wasn’t getting as many drafting projects as I thought I should. Well, I’m doing more of everything these days, and that includes drafting projects. In case anyone’s interested, let me tell you about a representative project that I worked on this month. I was contacted by the general counsel … Read More
Remember my ebook The Structure of M&A Contracts? Me neither, almost. It has been available only on the Thomson Reuters ProView app. Because of various problems—for one thing, it hasn’t be easy to purchase—the book has been largely invisible. That’s a pity, as I think, with whatever objectivity I can muster, that it’s the clearest, most rigorous, and most innovative treatment of … Read More
Via this post on Profit and Laws, I learned about LegalSifter. LegalSifter’s website offers very little information. More informative is this piece on TechCrunch: Using natural language processing, the service scans your documents (in Word format only, for now) and assigns them a score based on how favorable the terms are for the user. It also provides users with an … Read More
I’ve previously considered reasonableness and good faith. (See MSCD 13.557 and this 2011 post.) Now it’s time to think about fairness. Just to set the scene, here’s how Black’s Law Dictionary (9th ed. 2009) defines fair: fair, adj. (bef. 12c) 1. Impartial; just; equitable; disinterested <everyone thought that Judge Jones was fair>. 2. Free of bias or prejudice <in jury … Read More
This post explains how to edit a cross-reference to a contract article so that the a in article is lowercase. Chris Lemens, this one’s for you! (When it comes to layout and related issues, Chris is Javert to my Jean Valjean.) Like any sane person, I use Word’s cross-reference function for the cross-references in contracts that I draft. Life’s too … Read More
I noticed this post last week on ContractsProf Blog. It’s about an online contract-drafting exercise developed by Zev Eigen of Northwestern Law School. It appears that the software pairs students who then negotiate and draft contracts for an employment relationship, based on a term sheet they’re provided. ContractsProf Blog offers little detail, and Professor Eigen prefers it that way. Here’s the … Read More
The showcase NDA template (here) uses the enumeration scheme recommended in my book A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. But another feature of the showcase template is how I went about applying the MSCD enumeration scheme. I used the Numbering Assistant, an enumeration tool developed by PayneGroup. In two respects, that has implications for how you work with a … Read More
