Today’s New York Times contains a column by Thomas Friedman (here) about innovation at a General Electric research lab. Here’s what Friedman says about such research centers generally: These centers are places where scientists and engineers from dozens of nationalities are using collaboration and crowd-sourcing to push out the boundaries of medical, manufacturing and material sciences, where possibilities seem infinite, … Read More
Via this post on Legal Informatics Blog, I learned of an article entitled Modularity and Innovation in Contract Design: A New Path for Transactional Legal Practice, 18 Stan. J.L. Bus. & Fin. 177 (2013). It’s by Associate Dean George Triantis of Stanford Law School. But apparently that article isn’t yet available—the SSRN link (here) in the Legal Informatics Blog post is to a Stanford … Read More
Recently, 3 Geeks and a Law Blog invited readers to suggest basic processes that law firms are really bad at. The responses they received are on display in this post, and two caught my eye: Maintaining Practice Group Forms One of the things that firms still struggle with is managing forms. It was something that has been discussed for years … Read More
A longtime reader had the following to say in an email to me: I use some outside counsel that I think are stellar brief-writers. Even their first drafts are generally very good. Then I get a draft settlement agreement or agreed protective order from them and groan. Why do they write contracts so badly? The prosaic reason is that they don’t write agreements … Read More
In this post on his Law21 blog, Jordan Furlong offered his thoughts on, among other topics, how bar associations could play a greater role in developing form documents. I recommend you read it. I posted a comment; to spare some of you the labor of clicking and scrolling, here’s the part of my comment that’s most relevant to Jordan’s suggestion: … Read More
In two recent posts I considered the merits of overhauling the language of your template commercial contracts (here) and the merits of automating them (here). But it’s important to consider that those tasks apply to different parts of the process. Automation allows you to prepare first drafts faster and with greater control that is possible using the traditional copy-and-paste approach. By … Read More
Yesterday’s post (here) concerned template process; today, let’s consider content. (Template content is a function of what you say and how you say it. Instead of constituting separate topics, they have a way of blending into each other—how you say something has a disconcerting way of changing what it means.) There are two kinds of template. There are templates for … Read More
In this post on his Connecticut Employment Law Blog, Daniel Schwartz tells an odd story, one that he first saw in Wolters Kluwer’s Employment Law Daily (here). What Happened An employee of Chanel’s fashion division was terminated. As a condition to being paid severance, she was asked to sign a “separation and release agreement” that, among other things, stated that … Read More
Here’s how Wikipedia describes “learned helplessness”: Learned helplessness is the condition of a human or animal that has learned to behave helplessly, failing to respond even though there are opportunities for it to help itself by avoiding unpleasant circumstances or by gaining positive rewards. Sound familiar? When it comes to contract language, I think of learned helplessness whenever I encounter people … Read More
In this post and this post I explain why my approach to contract language doesn’t favor clarity over avoiding risk. There’s no plausible reason for anyone to spurn A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. Nevertheless, inertia remains. Someone who attended one of my seminars made the following point in a LinkedIn message to me: I would love to be able … Read More
