Apparently Emily Dickinson said, somewhere, “If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves.” That sounds comforting, but it seems like a recipe for unexpectedly being steamrollered while you’re taking care of the small things.
Here’s a more reliable but downbeat alternative, said by me, right here: “If you mess up the small things, you’ll also mess up the big things.”
I’m sure you can apply it to all sorts of activities, but you’ll be shocked to hear I think it applies to contract drafting.
In reading a contract, I might see small glitches that have no effect on meaning. For example, whoever drafted a given contract might do this:
- Use Word as if their computer is a typewriter—hit the “Enter” key to create space between blocks of text.
- In using a party-name defined term that’s a common noun (for example, Company), be inconsistent in using the defined article the (Company versus the Company).
- Be erratic in putting quotation marks around a defined term when creating that defined term—use curly quotation marks for some and straight quotation marks for others (a sign of copy-and-pasting) or bold some quotation marks but not others.
When I see that sort of thing, I assume the one or more drafters have also messed up to a meaningful degree the tasks that do affect meaning—deciding what you want to say and how to say it. If you can’t muster sufficient attention to detail to get the trivial stuff right, it’s unlikely you’re going to get the harder stuff right.
Mind you, getting the trivial stuff right doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the bigger stuff right, but I like your odds better.
