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Response to a Young Traditionalist

Hot on the heels of Venkat Balasubramani’s Twitter update reminding me of all those I have yet to convince came a message from one of the unconvinced. The individual in question had watched my first webcast and had some questions that we discussed by email. His second email to me ended with the following paragraph: If it is helpful to … Read More

Contract Drafting as a “Niche” Subject

Twitter has become a low-key part of my public profile (my Twitter ID is @AdamsDrafting). Links to my new blog posts go out automatically on Twitter; I indulge in the occasional bit of flagrant self-promotion, these days mostly about my webcasts; and I sporadically offer up any halfway rational and maybe-interesting thought that otherwise doesn’t have a home. But my focus … Read More

“Because” and Causation Issues in Contracts

Thanks to reader Steven Sholk, I learned that the U.S. Supreme Court recently considered the “ordinary meaning” of the words because of. Here’s how the CCH Workday blog described the issue: Construing this critical preposition in the text of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), a five-Justice majority concluded the statute’s requirement that an adverse employment action was taken … Read More

Training Your “Apprentices” in Contract Drafting

You can find plenty of discussion online, at Above the Law and elsewhere, of the new “apprenticeship” model of first-year-associatedom at a handful of law firms. I suggest that such firms have a choice: either they’re going to give their apprentices the same old training, just more of it, or they’re going to use their new programs as an occasion … Read More

“Forthwith”—A Quaint Archaism

Methinks forthwith has as a fusty, moldy air about it. I wasn’t surprised to see it included, along with the likes of hither and mayhap, in this list of quaintly archaic words. But lo and behold, forthwith was used in 502 contracts filed in the past month on the SEC’s EDGAR system, as compared with 1704 contracts using a more … Read More

“Obligate” v. “Oblige”

In this comment to a previous post, reader Mark Anderson expressed a preference for saying that parties are obliged to do something, rather than obligated. He suggested that use of the verb obligate is the result of the noun obligation being pressed into service as a verb. Here’s the opening paragraph of what A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage has … Read More

A Contract-Language French-English “False Friend”

In the course of considering, for purposes of today’s post on time is of the essence, how contracts are drafted in Quebec, I came across an oddity of the sort that I wouldn’t have expected to encounter in contract language—an instance of “false friends,” in other words pairs of words in two different languages that sound similar but have different … Read More

“Represents, Warrants, Covenants and Agrees”

I received the following cry of despair from a Canadian reader: I’m preparing a partnership agreement and have been given precedent to work with. Using MSCD, I have spent some time trying to rework the precedent’s archaic language to make it more readable. It says, several times, “Each of the Partners severally represents, warrants, covenants and agrees with each other … Read More