This post from last October contains my report card on Rocket Lawyer’s document-assembly confidentiality agreement. My conclusion? It stinks. In this recent post on his blog, Bill Carleton included a link to the “Document Factory Starter Kit” offered by the global law firm DLA Piper. Here’s how DLA Piper describes it: This Starter Kit will enable you to generate basic … Read More
A few days ago I uploaded a revised version of Koncision’s confidentiality-agreement template. Apart from glitches lurking in a few branches of the template’s copious decision tree, I changed how the template refers to duration of the obligation to keep information confidential. Anyone completing the previous version of the questionnaire was offered the following answers to the question regarding duration … Read More
Last December, I mothballed the AdamsDrafting blog and fired up The Koncise Drafter. If I were concerned about my stats, that move would have been a disaster—as it’s home to four years of my musings, the AdamsDrafting blog still gets about three times as many hits as The Koncise Drafter. But I’m not selling ads and don’t have to meet … Read More
Hot on the heels of my notion of “language of intention” comes a candidate for yet another new category of contract language: language of recommendation. Consider the following extract from a stock option agreement (emphasis added): As a result, the Company strongly recommends that the Grantee not rely on the information in this Appendix as the only source of information relating to … Read More
Recently I’ve been exploring the gray areas of categories-of-contract-language analysis. (For example, go here for my trial balloon regarding “language of intention.”) Well, it’s time to consider another such issue. In my seminars and my course at Penn Law, we consider a series of “before” and “after” examples designed to highlight categories-of-contract-language issues. Here’s one of those examples, drawn from … Read More
When you add verbiage to a contract provision not to change its meaning but to make it more emphatic, you’re indulging in “rhetorical emphasis.” Contract prose is better off without rhetorical emphasis, as contracts don’t serve to persuade. I’ve mentioned rhetorical emphasis plenty over the years; go here for a listing of posts on the old AdamsDrafting blog that mention … Read More
Reader Steven Sholk told me about this article on the phrase sole and absolute discretion that appeared last week in the New York Law Journal. It focuses on New York caselaw. Having written an article of my own on the implications of this phrase (available here), I was interested to see what the article had to say. But it doesn’t … Read More
Unsure whether you should be paying someone at the law firm of Preen & Strut $600 an hour to draft your contracts? Or uncertain whether a member of your in-house legal staff is doing a good job with your templates? Well, take the following quiz and all will be revealed! (In the quiz, the phrase “your guy” is gender-neutral.) A … Read More
I’ve written lots about represents and warrants (and representations and warranties), culminating in a series of posts a couple of years ago. See, in reverse chronological order, this post, this post, this post, and this post. With the last of those posts, I felt as if for the time being I’d said pretty much all I could say. And I felt … Read More
Last week I gave my “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in Santa Clara. During a break, one of the participants asked me if I thought it matters in what order the parties sign a contract. More specifically, she’s concerned about sending out a contract drafted and signed by her company and getting back a fully signed copy with changes added by … Read More
