Yesterday I received from longtime reader Chris Lemens an email complaining about someone opting for indemnify, hold harmless, and exonerate. It’s bad enough to have hold harmless, not to mention defend—why add exonerate!
I looked into indemnify plus exonerate, and yes, it’s a thing:
But inspired by Chris, I looked for other gratuitous additions to indemnify, and I found protect:
Then I threw caution to wind and found gross-up, reimburse, and make whole:
I’m sure that in another 15 minutes on EDGAR I could have found additional verbs used with indemnify. Anyone have any other candidates, with screenshots to prove it?
The moral of this story is that it’s dumb to add extra verbs in the hope that somehow they’ll provide more indemnification coverage. If you want indemnification to cover a particular circumstance, say so explicitly. When you do that, the verb becomes largely irrelevant. Go with just indemnify, until such time as there’s appetite for a simpler verb.
(If you’re in an indemnification frame of mind, go here for all my posts on indemnification.)
Ken:
I am going to write a counter-point to MCSD called the Manual of Magic Spells at Law. It will recommend using at least two words — better yet three — in order to assure that the Power of Law (which must always be capitalized) is properly Invoked (also capitalized). For major arcana, one must go further though: Nothing short of seven synonyms will do! So this article provides a fine list for the concept of paying for bad things that happen. You just happen to have hit the Magic Numbyr (both capitalized and oddly spelled) of seven. Well done!
Chris
Chris, that is truly the way.