I’ve been prone to using the phrase contracts professional as a way to refer collectively to (1) lawyers who work with contracts and (2) contract managers. But I’m not keen on the term. When used as a noun, the word professional is slippery. In its narrowest sense, it’s used to refer to those who work in fields that require some sort of certification—lawyers, … Read More
Are you familiar with broken-windows theory? Here’s the gist of it from the 1982 article in The Atlantic that introduced the theory: Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods … Read More
Via @lisasolomon I learned of a new piece by Glenn West. It’s entitled Contract Drafting 101: A Checklist Derived from Recent Caselaw, and it forms part of the materials for a course for in-house counsel offered on 10 August 2016 by the State Bar of Texas. It’s available here. For information about the course, go here. In this piece, Glenn considers recent caselaw that illustrates … Read More
My post on contracting by the US states (here) prompted @CherylStephens to inform me on Twitter of this post from a couple of days ago on the UK government blog Digital Marketplace. It’s by Jason Waterman from the Crown Commercial Service and Warren Smith from Government Digital Service, and it’s entitled Working together to design government contracts for the digital age. It’s … Read More
I noted with interest this article on problems with Virginia’s contracting system. I’ll take the liberty of quoting most of it: Virginia’s $6 billion-a-year contracting system has serious flaws — including multi-million dollar contracts managed by untrained staff and contracts that are prepared without legal review, according to a new state report issued Monday. The General Assembly’s watchdog agency, the Joint … Read More
Business Law Today contains an article entitled Data, Contracts, and Making Hard Decisions—Changing the Way We Manage Risk. It’s by Jamie May, associate general counsel at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. I had the pleasure of meeting Jamie a few years ago, when he wore a different hat, and I’ve corresponded with him sporadically. Here’s the first paragraph of Jamie’s article: Contracts … Read More
The Google Ngram Viewer is a neat tool. It allows you to check the relative frequency with which words and phrases appear, over time, in Google’s corpus of millions of digitized books. It follows that the Ngram Viewer can help you build a case that a given word or phrase is the more modern choice than another word or phrase … Read More
Although I’m committed to helping anyone who’s interested become an informed consumer of contract language, I think it’s self-evident that automated contract creation is the most effective way to scale rigorous contract language. That’s why I continue to discuss automation with my clients. Some of you might recall that my software of choice is ContractExpress. That remains the case even though … Read More
Two people I enjoy following on Twitter are Kyle Mitchell (@kemitchell) and Ansel Halliburton (@anseljh). They’re half my age and twice my technical sophistication, they’re interested in contracts, and they throw around ideas that largely go over my head but certainly seem ambitious. Here’s Ansel’s latest idea: Updated some *very early* thoughts about what Simplified Legal English could look like. Comments? … Read More
Today, my mole buried deep in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California—oh all right, it was @VBalasubramani—told me about Total Recall Techs. v. Luckey, No. C 15-02281 WHA, 2016 WL 199796 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 16, 2016) (PDF here). It involves a dispute between plaintiff Total Recall Technologies (a general partnership of Thomas Seidl and Ron Igra) and defendant Palmer … Read More
