My thoughts are turning to my fall 2009 contract-drafting course at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. It’s time for me to start looking again for a company interested in taking part in a contract-redrafting project with my class.
As previously, I’ll select one contract out of those submitted. The deadline for submitting is June 15. In the fall my class will redraft all or, more likely, part of the contract, and I’ll prepare an extensively annoted “before” version to explain the shortcomings in the original. I’ll send our redraft and the annotated version to the company, and sometime in December we’ll have a conference call with company personnel to discuss our changes.
I explain in this March 2007 post why I think redrafting projects can be valuable for my students and, one hopes, the company involved. And in this December 2008 post I discuss how the fall 2008 redrafting project went.
Here’s how I’d like this fall’s project to play out:
- I select a contract submitted by a major company located in the U.S. or elsewhere.
- The contract in question is a core template that the company enters into dozens or hundreds of times a year.
- The company had been planning its own redraft of the template.
- The company’s general counsel, or someone else high up in the law department, has approved participation in the project.
- The person spearheading the project at the company is familiar with what I do and has, or gets hold of, a copy of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting.
- Senior legal and contracts personnel at the company review closely our redraft and the annoted version and take part in the conference call.
- The company’s contract and our work on it remains confidential, but the company is willing to have me disclose publicly after the fact that it has participated in the project.
If you’re interested in having your company considered for this project, please send me an email describing what kind of contract you have in mind submitting and explaining why you’d like to participate.
