Recently, I’d been feeling restless. Irritable. Prone to laughing jags and fits of tears. I knew that I needed the wisdom of one graced with insight. So I set off a quest, and in the Karakoram, on a ledge high on Gasherbrum IV, I found him, sitting cross-legged in a loin cloth, making origami out of glossy law-firm marketing brochures. … Read More
Last week I was involved in the following exchange on Twitter with @ClearLanguage and @mrsalzwedel regarding—of course—shall: @KonciseD @500wordlawyer @ClearLanguage: I read many contracts where the lawyer uses shall in 3-6 senses. Perhaps efficiency = just drop it? — Matthew Salzwedel (@mrsalzwedel) May 8, 2014 I replied to Matthew that I’d answer his question on my blog, so here we … Read More
A blog post by Tim Cummins of IACCM entitled “Contract Drafting, Communications & Risk” (here) met with quite a bit of approval on Twitter. So I looked at it, then looked at it again. Tim, I hope you’ll permit me some comments from the peanut gallery. Of course I agree entirely with the premise of Tim’s post: Contracts that fail to … Read More
The May 16 issue of the Canadian periodical The Lawyers Weekly contains my article With “Efforts” Provisions, Reasonable Is Better Than Best. Go here for a PDF. It’s addresses the Canadian caselaw, but it should be of interest to anyone who has wondered about how to handle best efforts versus reasonable efforts or any other efforts variant.
Because of the novelty, I tend to blog more about seminars I give overseas compared to ones I give in the U.S. and Canada. But apart from some peripheral local color, all seminars, wherever they’re held, feature the same dynamic. And they all get my full attention. Before I head to Europe later this month, I have public seminars in Chicago on … Read More
Here’s what MSCD 3.244–45 has to say about “passive-type policies”: Some policies are characterized by adjectives such as exercisable and payable and have a structure that’s analogous to the passive voice. This manual refers to such policies as “passive-type policies.” Passive-type policies have two shortcomings. First, as with passive verb phrases (see 3.11), the agent can be expressed by a by-agent, but in contracts … Read More
I’m giving you a crazy amount of advance notice, but on October 16 I’ll be giving for eCPD Webinars a webinar entitled “The Perils of Translating International Contracts.” For more information, go here. Because I’ve lived in various French-speaking countries, and because my sister Christine is a conference interpreter (check out her blog posts on the history of interpreting, here), I’ve … Read More
I noticed a recent case out of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Redmond v. Sirius International Insurance Corporation (here). The language at issue used and/or. Here’s what the court had to say: The plaintiff contends that the court must reconsider its denial of his motion for summary judgment because the use of “and/or” in the policy … Read More
The ineffable A. Wright Burke, M. Phil., asked me today why I don’t offer gradations of “Drafting Clearer Contracts.” “Introduction to.” “Intermediary.” “Ninja.” And so on. He posed his question with the best of intentions, so he probably didn’t expect me to start scowling and gnashing my teeth. Contract drafting isn’t like learning macramé, where you can start with a … Read More
[Updated May 29, 2014: My Vilnius roll-of-the-dice fell short: it was so last minute that my local partner wasn’t able to find enough people interested. I expect to go to Vilnius on some future trip.] On 30 May, I’m doing a “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the Hotel Artis. For information in English, go here; for information … Read More
