You’re an in-house lawyer who consults A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. In fact, it’s widely used in your department—your company does its best to produce contracts that are clear, modern, and effective. But for your outside counsel, it’s business as usual—when you ask them to prepare a contract, they give you traditional contract language. Well, if you have any … Read More
If you want a video title that will send the masses rushing to the exits, you couldn’t get much better than “A Day in the Life of a Lawyer: Drafting a Contract.” That’s the title of an 18-minute video on YouTube; I’ve embedded it for your edification. It’s one of three videos forming part of “A Day in the Life … Read More
In his recent column in the ABA Journal entitled Why Lawyers Can’t Write, Bryan Garner describes how lawyers generally think they’re great writers yet are in fact depressingly inept. No news there. But what caught my eye was Garner’s suggestion that this delusion “is significantly higher among transactional lawyers than it is among litigators.” He goes on: Transactional lawyers have … Read More
Via @chbusca and the Legal Informatics blog, I learned that Harry Surden of the University of Colorado Law School has published in the UC Davis Law Review an article with the concise title Computable Contracts. (It makes a change from the tedious business of cutesy title, colon, long-winded subtitle.) Here’s the abstract: It is possible to formulate contractual obligations so … Read More
It’s Wednesday, January 30. This afternoon I’ll be at LegalTech, in New York, hanging out with the ContractExpress team, at booth 324/6. But I won’t be on the prowl for technology relating to contract drafting and the contract process, because we already have great technology. Document-assembly software that does everything you could want? Check. Software to monitor every step in the … Read More
I periodically moan about how inertia has rendered most of corporate America either complacent about suboptimal contract templates or incapable of doing anything about them. See for example this March 2012 post, and this article discussing a major source of inertia, the urge for autonomy. I’m inclined to think that a company won’t overhaul its templates unless someone higher up … Read More
In this post on recent developments in legal publishing, Ron Friedmann posits that knowledge management is evolving “from content to tools to true productivity.” He offers the following analysis: For much of the 1990s, legal professionals did not even use the “KM word”. Instead, we talked about work product retrieval and precedents. That continued into the new century until we … Read More
Taking up a challenge posed by Brian Rogers, last week I posted a response to this question on Quora. (For more about that, see this post.) That was my first time on Quora; to get a better sense of what it was about, over the next few days I answered some more questions. (To see my answers, go to my … Read More
Today’s post on boilerplate reminded me that recently a publisher asked me whether I’d be interested in writing a book on contract boilerplate. I said I would not. For one thing, I have no room in my life for preparing anything on the scale of Tina Stark’s Negotiating and Drafting Contract Boilerplate. But more to the point, the vast majority … Read More
This article by Monica Bay in Law Technology News caught my eye. It describes how D. Casey Flaherty, corporate counsel at Kia Motors, uses an audit program to assess how cost-effective its outside counsel are in handling basic, frequently recurring billable tasks: The firm’s sacrificial lamb associate is asked to perform four mock tasks, that are evaluated by the outside counsel. Examples … Read More
