I’m blessed with idiot-savant semantic acuity but cursed by a lack of any training in grammar or linguistics. That makes for an awkward combination: I recognize when something is going on in a sentence, then I hit the books and, if necessary, go for help. (See this post about my ambiguity sensei, Rodney Huddleston.) That played out yesterday. I made … Read More
Today’s I offer you another interesting contracts verb structure, hereby instructs. Here are some examples from EDGAR: The Employee hereby instructs the Company to transfer to such Managers Insurance and/or Pension Plan the amount of Employee ’s and the Company’s contribution from the Monthly Salary, as detailed in Annex A. The Collateral Manager hereby instructs the Collection Account Bank, on … Read More
It’s an interesting business, having a storefront for my course Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass. If you go to the home page, you’ll see that I’ve added some stuff. Value Proposition I’ve added this paragraph to explain the value of the course: Why take Masterclass? Because traditional contract language is dysfunctional. It’s full of archaisms, redundancies, random verb structures, and ill-conceived conventional … Read More
Today I joined Colin Cannell, Gabe Meister, and Jen Roemershauser in a 30-minute conversation about my recently launched course Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass. They’re well equipped to discuss the course because they took part in the trial version of it and lived to tell the tale. My thanks to Colin, Gabe, and Jen for taking the time to join me. … Read More
Plenty of you appreciate what I do. I know that because I hear from you. And plenty of you have given me written testimonials; for example, go here, here, here, and here. But I’d like to help foster more of a sense of community—yes, a community of contract-language nerds, but still a community—by having you share your impressions in a more, uh, intimate form. … Read More
With this blog post, yesterday I launched my new online course, Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass. Now let me tell you more about what the course covers. The course outline provides an overview of what’s required to prepare for each session and what we discuss in each session. For more detail, click on “Register Now” on the home page (or click … Read More
I’m pleased to announce that you can now register for my new online course, Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass. The Course This course is built around eight live hour-long sessions held once a week and supplemented by reading, quizzes, and short assignments. Go here for the course outline. The goal is to help you say clearly whatever you want to say … Read More
In this post from late last year, I said I didn’t think I would ever travel as much as I did in 2019. But when I wrote it, I of course didn’t expect things to fall off a cliff they way they have. I’ve travelled only once this year, in March, for a seminar in Chicago. It had a last-helicopter-from-Saigon … Read More
The pandemic has aggravated my tendency to lurk on EDGAR, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s database where public companies file their “material” contracts. Now I dream up the weirdest things I can think of, then I look for them on EDGAR. “Throat-clearing” is when a redundant verb structure is tacked on to the front of a provision. Who can … Read More
The legal profession has a love-hate relationship with technology. On the one hand, lawyers are, uh, challenged when it comes to using basic technology. And technology vendors tend to grouse that selling to lawyers is a hassle. On the other hand, the legal profession is prone to spasms of enthusiasm over technology. It periodically throws money at some new technology, … Read More
