Yesterday I did this post about the recent First Circuit opinion in which lack of a serial (or Oxford) comma featured prominently. That opinion prompted no end of articles in the established media (including this article in the New York Times) and no end of chatter on social media. And many of my readers rushed to tell me about it. … Read More
In an opinion issued this week, O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901, 2017 WL 957195 (1st Cir. Mar. 13, 2017) (PDF here), the First Circuit considered the meaning of the following: The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: Did “packing for shipment or distribution” refer to two kinds of packing, or did it … Read More
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the number of readers my cross-posts on LinkedIn have been getting, so for the heck of it I published on LinkedIn an article entitled “Do Your Contracts Matter?” It’s here.
In MSCD 3.47, I say the following: For purposes of business contracts, as opposed to statutes, it’s unlikely that anyone could successfully argue that instead of expressing an obligation, a particular shall is “discretionary” and means may or should. Well, courtesy of @mrsalzwedel I learned of PacifiCorp v. Sempra Energy Trading Corp., No. CIV-04-0701 (E.D. Cal. 2 July 2004), an opinion … Read More
Thanks to this update on LinkedIn by lawyer Alexander Tyulkanov, I saw this GE Report, entitled “Honey, I Shrunk The Contract: How Plain English Is Helping GE Keep Its Business Humming.” It describes how GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions unit replaced their seven bloated and archaic templates, each a hundred pages plus, with a five-page plain-English contract. It’s a great story. It reflects what … Read More
Here are the first two sentences of the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, as I currently imagine them: This manual offers guidelines for clear and concise contract language. If you’re making decisions regarding contract language without consulting it, odds are you’re copy-and-pasting, relying on flimsy conventional wisdom, or improvising. I hear you saying to yourselves, … Read More
[Updated 9 March 2017: Thank you all, but I now have all the volunteers I can handle.] OK, girls and boys, it’s time to start the process of publishing the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. The first part of that process is having some brave souls crawl over the manuscript looking for problems big and … Read More
Here’s what I said in this 2014 post: [I]f a party that is subject to a condition is in a position to act as if the condition has been satisfied even if it in fact hasn’t been satisfied, should the issue in question instead be stated as an obligation? My answer was yes, it should. This issue is subtle enough … Read More
That post about among other things (here)? I’ll now make a similar point about etc. Using etc. is never great. It’s casual, so it unsuited to the limited and stylized world of contract prose. But more to the point, etc. is either redundant, in which case you can get rid of it, or it’s not redundant, which case it’s potentially … Read More
The phrase among other things is usually benign, because usually it’s used to refer to something treated fully elsewhere—for example, in the same contract (the first example below) or in another contract (the example under it). Attached as Appendix A is an amended and restated Schedule B to the Subadvisory Agreement setting forth, among other things, the fee that the … Read More
