During my conversation with Dan Schwartz in connection with yesterday’s post about how to express at-will employment, Dan mentioned this post on the Minnesota Labor & Employment Law Blog, by Tiffany Schmidt of Abrams & Schmidt. It describes a Minnesota Court of Appeals case in which a school director challenged his termination. This case provides a useful cautionary tale for contract … Read More
Here’s a follow up to this recent post on how best to teach contract drafting at law school. The indefatigable Lisa Solomon told me about this article in the legal-writing journal Perspectives. It’s by Sue Payne, a clinical assistant professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law, and it describes how in two 90-minute classes she teaches contract drafting to … Read More
It’s been ten days since my previous post, but it feels a lot longer—please excuse my silence. It was caused by a combination of travel, short-deadline work, and a perfect storm of technology issues: Hacked website! Viruses! Hardware malfunction! There’s nothing like spending hours on the phone with distant technicians of varying competence to take it out of one. To … Read More
I’m coming late to the discussion of “good enough” in the context of legal services. I’ve encountered several blog posts that come at this issue from different perspectives, including this one by Carolyn Elefant, this one by Ron Friedmann, and this one by Wayne Schiess. Some of the recent discussion of this topic was prompted by Robert Capps’s August 2009 article in Wired … Read More
The phrases “mere condition” and “mere covenant” (and the latter phrase’s more modern equivalent, “mere obligation”) occur quite often in caselaw, as well as in the literature on contract law. A search of Lexis’s “Federal & State Cases, Combined” database found 940, 536, and 353 instances, respectively, of those phrases. But those phrases, and analogues using “merely,” make me uneasy, particularly when used … Read More
MSCD 16.29–31 deals with “rhetorical emphasis.” That’s the term I use to describe language you shovel into a contract provision to show that you really, really mean it. Every so often I encounter new examples of rhetorical emphasis. (See for example this August 2008 blog post about in all respects.) Here’s another symptom of rhetorical emphasis: fully. More often than … Read More
Parsing redundancy in contract language can get old, because it comes in endless shape-shifting forms. But a fundamental and intriguing kind of redundancy involves conjunctions. It’s high time that I consider unless and until. It features prominently in contract language. For example, 842 “material contracts” filed on the SEC’s EDGAR system in the past month use unless and until. (Another 26 use … Read More
In December 2007 I underwent a Damascene conversion and switched typefaces—for purposes of contracts and pretty much everything else—to Calibri, one of a new suite of Microsoft typefaces. Calibri has been designated the default typeface for body text in Office 2007, and the Word 2007 default font for body text is 11-point Calibri. (Click here for a pdf sample of Calibri.) … Read More
The Conglomerate Blog has been running an interesting series of posts on the theme of “Minding our own business: How changes in the business of law might affect law schools and what law professors should be doing about it.” The most recent one is here, and is by Michelle Harner, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. … Read More
In this item on his blog, the inestimable Ron Friedmann ponders the extent to which an “open source” approach to work product would save time and money for law departments. Here’s how Ron frames his thought experiment: So assume that confidentiality, privilege, and competitive issues matter not, that law departments contributed a significant portion of work product—generated internally or by … Read More
