Last year, while I was at a prominent law firm to do a seminar, someone from the law firm emphasized to me that they don’t use standard templates. Instead, they want their junior lawyers to figure out for themselves what should be in a given contract. I thought of that when I read the following in Milgrim on Licensing, at § 10.00: … Read More
My article Eliminating the Phrase Represents and Warrants from Contracts is now available. It’s in the latest issue of Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law. Go here for a PDF. This article shows that it’s pointless and confusing to use represents or warrants in a contract to introduce statements of fact. It recommends that instead you use states to introduce … Read More
[Updated June 30, 2015: Here’s an update from Blake: In our job search, we stated that knowledge of MSCD was a “preferred qualification.” Out of dozens of qualified applicants, we narrowed the pool to four people. We gave all four candidates a “homework” assignment of drafting a contract in accordance with MSCD. (We assigned the candidates random numbers and graded … Read More
I noted with interest this post by Ken Grady on Seyfarth Shaw’s Seytlines blog, particularly as last year I did a Q&A with Ken on this blog (here). Ken’s post is about quality in contracting. He starts by discussing the limitations of determining quality by proxy. As he says, “Trusting the brand, versus trusting metrics that measure desired characteristics, is … 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
The contract process divides neatly into two parts: stuff that happens before a contract is signed, and stuff that happens after. I never get involved with what happens after signing, unless it has to do with amending a contract. But I try to keep informed, which is why I’ve sniffed around contract-lifecycle-management (CLM) software. See for example this 2007 post. The big … Read More
Via a regular source of my Twitter leads, @ronfriedmann, I learned of this article in Corporate Counsel by Sue Reisinger about how a team at IBM “earned international recognition for taking dozens of pages of complex contracts for cloud services and reducing them to a simple, two-page document.” Assuming that you get rid of the dead wood, make appropriate trade-offs, and don’t … Read More
