Oxford University Press was kind enough to send me a review copy of their new book Elements of Contract Interpretation, by Steven J. Burton, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. I’m now going to repay them for their generosity by observing that I’m having a hard time getting into it. That has little to do with … Read More
Today sees the launch of webcast 5 in my series Drafting Clearer Contracts, which is being offered by West LegalEdcenter and is sponsored by Business Integrity. Webcast 5 will run as a “live” webcast starting at 1:00 p.m. EDT, meaning that I’ll be on hand to respond in writing to any questions submitted. Starting a day or two later, it … Read More
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
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
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
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
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
Today the Law Shucks blog posted this item about a former IBM executive, David L. Johnson, who is claiming that his noncompetition agreement with IBM is unenforceable. One element of his defense is that he signed the contract in the space where IBM was supposed to sign. According to Bloomberg: Johnson told Robinson he signed the agreement on the space where … Read More
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
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
