A casualty of the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting was what had been chapter 20 of the third edition, entitled “Drafting Corporate Resolutions.” I figured that the book had gotten big enough that that chapter, which doesn’t have anything to do with contracts, would be clutter.
But that chapter is a good example of what I do. I took a topic that had essentially never been addressed—how to draft corporate resolutions clearly—and I gave it the sort of comprehensive treatment that no one ever would have given it. I’ve long thought it a pity it was no longer available, so I’ve exhumed it. Go here.
Well, it’s not quite accurate to say that no one had ever addressed this topic. I had, in a 2002 article for Practical Lawyer, here. It was superseded by the MSCD chapter.
I was prompted to do this post by a reader who told me that the link to the Practical Lawyer article was dead. After I sent him the MSCD chapter, he said, “I was working off templates from Practical Law, and as you can imagine, they are littered with legal mumbo-jumbo. And I did not do as good of a job simplifying the language as you did.”
But in the after version, ditch the first-line indent of the first paragraph and the concluding clause—first-line indent was another casualty of the fourth edition, and good riddance!
