In 2015 I did these three posts about governing-law provisions. Well, it’s time to look at the subject again, thanks to a law-review article by John F. Coyle of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The article is entitled The Canons of Construction for Choice-of-Law Clauses; go here for a PDF. Professor Coyle is to be congratulated for writing … Read More
I love it when I write about something that doesn’t make sense, and caselaw comes along to show that not only does it not make sense, it can also lead to a messy, expensive fight. Today’s topic is the practice of having lawyers sign settlement agreements under the notation APPROVED AS TO FORM AND CONTENT. I wrote about it in … Read More
The summer 2019 issue of The Business Lawyer—the law review published by the Business Law Section of the ABA—contains my article Interpreting and Drafting Efforts Provisions: From Unreason to Reason. Go here for a PDF. No one has ever offered an even halfway serious attempt to explain a distinction between different efforts (or endeavours) provisions, or lack of a distinction. … Read More
As promised, go here for information about my 14 November 2019 “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in Seoul, organized by my partner LAWnB, a Thomson Reuters entity. As usual, the registration information is in Korean, but go here for a brochure in English. I’m looking forward to it, of course. I always enjoy my visits to Seoul. Koreans might find of … Read More
Bryan Garner is a big name in legal lexicography, litigation writing, and guidance on general English usage. He has a new book out, on contract drafting. It’s called Garner’s Guidelines for Drafting and Editing Contracts, and it’s not good. But first, why write a review? Because using any reference work requires a leap of faith, and book reviews help readers … Read More
I noted with interest an article entitled “Including Without Limitation” (in this issue of The Transactional Lawyer), by Stephen L. Sepinuck of Gonzaga University School of Law. I’ll discuss later in this post the part about including without limitation. But let’s start with what is for me the more interesting part—the last two columns, in particular the following description of … Read More
My article Interpreting and Drafting Efforts Provisions: From Unreason to Reason is in the summer 2019 issue of the journal The Business Lawyer, published by the Section of Business Law of the American Bar Association. (PDF here.) The article refers to instances of the phrases best efforts and reasonable efforts the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA. Go here … Read More
It’s been a long time since I’ve offered you an effed-up way to impose an obligation on the subject of a sentence. With that in mind, I now proudly present *drum roll* hereby binds itself to! Mostly, hereby binds itself to is used as a needless variant of hereby assumes all obligations under, or some such. But here are some … Read More
The title of this post sounds aspirational, rather like “A chicken in every pot.” But it’s not: instead, it’s how I conduct my “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars. I suppose at some seminars the speaker introduces you to their approach to something, with the seminar acting as a teaser. If you like the seminar, you have the option of investing in … Read More
I’ve had my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 for three and a half years. It’s a travel laptop, and it’s been perfect for what I do. It’s light, so humping it around the world hasn’t been a problem. It’s plenty powerful and capacious. And I’ve used it in tablet form to do PowerPoint presentations for my “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars. Using … Read More
