August 12, 2007 More on Retrieving and Using Contracts Filed with the SEC
In this December 2006 post I discussed ways of retrieving contracts that have been filed on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system. In a comment I mentioned an additional source, RealDealDocs, but noted that I hadn’t kicked their tires.
Well, I still haven’t, because I’m happy doing my own searches (for free) on Lexis. But if you’re interested in RealDealDocs, Dennis Kennedy gives some basic information about them in this TechnoLawyer article.
As I said in my original post, the fact that a contract is on EDGAR is—to say the least—no guarantee of quality. Note that Dennis says that a contract retrieved from EDGAR “can serve as an initial prototype, a checklist for issues, or as a useful way to determine how others treat similar deals.” He pointedly doesn’t suggest that after swapping out party information and key deal terms you could safely use an EDGAR contract as your own.
November 2, 2007 at 3:11 pm
[…] The whole concept is sufficiently ludicrous that I’d feel silly critiquing it in detail. Even if it contained 75,000 as opposed to 750 contracts, I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. If you need a contract model and your colleagues are unable to help out and no relevant treatise is available, a number of services allow you to tap into the vast resource that is EDGAR. (See this post and this post.) […]