Friends, the fifth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting (otherwise known as MSCD5) will be available for purchase from the American Bar Association in mid-April 2023. To echo what a deeply nerdy reader actually said, “I feel excitement in the air!” It has been a long time coming. I started work on it in November 2021. And … Read More
An exchange of tweets by Ron Friedmann and Casey Flaherty (here) yesterday prompted much cocktail-party conversation on the state of the legal market, with an emphasis on the implications of the new variant of artificial intelligence known as ChatGPT. (I wrote about ChatGPT in this blog post.) A recurring theme in the discussion was the notion that contracts can be … Read More
Last night I watched the Netflix movie Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery with my daughter Sydney, who’s home for the holidays. (If you haven’t seen the movie, this reveals a piece of the puzzle, so you might want to stop reading.) We found the movie entertaining, but given that my life’s work consists of rooting around in the contracts … Read More
Of the sixty-odd articles I’ve written, one is a real turkey: Revisiting the Ambiguity of “And” and “Or” in Legal Drafting, published in 2006. It flubs the analysis of or. I was subsequently rescued by Rodney Huddleston, titan of linguistics (see this 2020 post), so in A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, the analysis of ambiguity associated with or … Read More
In a conversation a few years ago with a BigLaw partner—a friend of MSCD—they recalled wistfully the first edition, which gave you relatively concise advice on the basics. Well, they’ll be even more wistful when they see MSCD5, because I’ve added greater detail. A good example is my treatment of our old friend efforts provisions. I’ve revised that chapter to … Read More
Recently I noticed this article on Artificial Lawyer. The title is Generative Legal AI + “The Last Human Mile”, and it’s about limits to applying AI to legal work. It says this: The last mile problem is a well-developed theory that many systems fail because there are some key steps at the end that cannot be done properly and that ruins … Read More
I noticed a 3 Geeks and a Law Blog podcast (here) that features Toby Brown answering a “crystal ball question.” Here’s the teaser: Toby Brown takes on our question this week by talking about the fact that attorneys are resistant to changing behaviors, not because they are unwilling to adapt to new technology, but because this is an industry that … Read More
If you spend any time on law-related social media, you’ve probably encountered chatter about ChatGPT, an AI chatbot system built on OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. (Yes, we’re talking artificial intelligence.) Drafting Contracts People have experimented with ChatGPT by asking it to do all sorts of things. (To … Read More
Last week I started the final Drafting Clearer Contracts: Masterclass series of 2022, but I haven’t yet announced any series for 2023. That’s because I want participants in the next series to have a copy of the fifth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, and I don’t yet know when MSCD5 will be available. I expect to … Read More
Apart from looking at a few AI-and-contracts services, I long ago stopped paying much attention to legaltech services relating to contracts. Because I don’t do deals, I don’t need what’s on offer, so I’m not in a good position to evaluate it. And the space is so active that even if I wanted to kick some tires, I wouldn’t know … Read More
