Taking up a challenge posed by Brian Rogers, last week I posted a response to this question on Quora. (For more about that, see this post.) That was my first time on Quora; to get a better sense of what it was about, over the next few days I answered some more questions. (To see my answers, go to my … Read More
Today’s post on boilerplate reminded me that recently a publisher asked me whether I’d be interested in writing a book on contract boilerplate. I said I would not. For one thing, I have no room in my life for preparing anything on the scale of Tina Stark’s Negotiating and Drafting Contract Boilerplate. But more to the point, the vast majority … Read More
This article by Monica Bay in Law Technology News caught my eye. It describes how D. Casey Flaherty, corporate counsel at Kia Motors, uses an audit program to assess how cost-effective its outside counsel are in handling basic, frequently recurring billable tasks: The firm’s sacrificial lamb associate is asked to perform four mock tasks, that are evaluated by the outside counsel. Examples … Read More
It might be easy enough to spot a particular issue when structuring a transaction. But addressing that issue appropriately in a contract requires careful aim, as anything other than a direct hit might create awkward problems. For example, I saw on Twitter, via the indefatigable Rob Hyndman, a link to this blog post by Michael Fitzgibbon of the Ontario employment … Read More
Via Ron Friedmann, I learned that Integreon, the legal-process-outsourcing vendor, has announced here a “new collaborative legal services delivery model” with the law firm Seyfarth Shaw. I gather from Ron’s tweet that it’s the third such partnership. The announcement is in businessspeak, featuring bombast, clichés, nominalizations, and gratuitous quotation marks. But the gist of it is that Integreon has partnered … Read More
I received the following email from a new U.S.-trained lawyer working outside the U.S. Hi there, I’m a new lawyer starting my first real legal job as in-house counsel for a new legal department in a foreign company. Much of the work I’m doing involves taking over and reviewing a broad range of contracts for projects or deals already underway. Some of these … Read More
I’m fond of saying that the first step in overhauling your contract process is analyzing the costs and risks of your current process. But what should such an analysis consist of? That question came to mind after my Inside Counsel SuperConference session last week. I was standing next to another of the presenters, Rees Morrison (he of the Law Department … Read More
[Updated 16 August 2020] I saw in a discussion on the LinkedIn “Contract and Commercial Management” group a reference to “leaving the law bit to the lawyers.” That got me wondering what, when it comes to deciding the terms of a deal and expressing it in a contract, “the law bit” might consist of. By my reckoning, the law bit … Read More
[Update: Go here for my article on this topic.] A forthcoming Missouri Law Review article by Davida Isaacs—it was featured in a recent item on the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog—discusses whether one could bring a claim for copyright infringement based on unauthorized copying of litigation documents. This article was also mentioned in an item by Gordon Smith on Conglomerate … Read More
