File this under “Better late than never.” Way late.
The second printing of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting came out in spring 2024. If you have a copy of the first printing, you might want to note in it changes I made to the second printing. Here they are:
- In section 2.92, parenthetical reference “(see 2.106)” was changed to “(see 2.105).”
- In figure 1, page 50, in the third column of “Expressing Conditions Using Language Obligation” row, “Widgetco.” was changed to “Widgetco … .”
- In section 3.457, the heading above “Using States” was changed to match the same level heading style as previous heading, “Statements of Fact—Using States and Addressing Remedies Directly.”
- In section 6.98, in the second line from the bottom, “cust0m-built” was changed to “custom-built.”
- In section 8.110, at the end of the first sentence, “(see 8.44)” was inserted in between “meaning” and the period at the end of the sentence.
- In section 9.3, the sentence “It suggests how to use nontrivial and dealbreaker instead of material and how to define material if you wish to retain it instead of using dealbreaker.” was changed by adding “And” at the beginning, so it reads “And it suggests how to use nontrivial and dealbreaker instead of material and how to define material if you wish to retain it instead of using dealbreaker.”
- In section 9.3, the following sentence (second to last of the section) was deleted: “And it explains that you’ll look in vain for some shared understanding of what material means.”
- In section 9.3, the reference at the end was updated from “21 Scribes Journal of Legal Writing (forthcoming 2023)” to “21 Scribes Journal of Legal Writing 85 (2023–2024).”
- In section 11.106, last sentence of the paragraph, “(If the noun is a mass noun, for example flour, instead of a count noun (vehicle), the ambiguity afflicts equivalents to all, for example the entire.)”, was replaced with this: “(In the case of a single item, ambiguity afflicts equivalents to all, including the whole and the entire.)”
- In section 13.229, URL in the last line of section was updated from “https://adamsdrafting.com/files/Notices-Provision.dox.” to “https://adamsdrafting.com/files/Notices-Provision.docx.”
- In the index entry for “cover sheet”, 4.110 was changed to 4.119.
- In the index entry for “irrevocably”, 13.293 was changed to 13.346.
- In the index entry for “governing-law provision”, 13.41 was changed to 13.42.
- In the index entry for “prior notice and notice”, 13.683–.689 was changed to 13.615–.622.
As changes go, I think we can say they’re minor. Why am I more than a year late in passing this on? Let’s attribute it to post-publication depression. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
