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.
I’ve heard lawyers from two English “Magic Circle” law firms say, in different words, the same thing: We treat contract templates as a starting point. We want our young lawyers to figure out for themselves how best to adapt the template to the deal. That confuses two parts of the deal process, namely (1) coming up with deal points and (2) … Read More
One company I know of has only a single procurement template that covers purchase of “all works, products, and services.” Another company has a different template (in both one-off and master versions) for purchase of each of the following: Professional services (in other words, consulting) Other services (such as catering and cleaning) Software (without related services) Software (with related services) … Read More
Yesterday, after a seminar for a group from one of the major US law firms, a partner mentioned to me that clients are increasingly asking that the law firm draft contracts more clearly. I didn’t get any details, but I suspect that clients make this request when the contracts being drafted are commercial contracts. For mergers-and-acquisitions and other bet-the-company work, … Read More
I’ve been prone to using the phrase contracts professional as a way to refer collectively to (1) lawyers who work with contracts and (2) contract managers. But I’m not keen on the term. When used as a noun, the word professional is slippery. In its narrowest sense, it’s used to refer to those who work in fields that require some sort of certification—lawyers, … Read More
Are you familiar with broken-windows theory? Here’s the gist of it from the 1982 article in The Atlantic that introduced the theory: Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods … Read More
Via @lisasolomon I learned of a new piece by Glenn West. It’s entitled Contract Drafting 101: A Checklist Derived from Recent Caselaw, and it forms part of the materials for a course for in-house counsel offered on 10 August 2016 by the State Bar of Texas. It’s available here. For information about the course, go here. In this piece, Glenn considers recent caselaw that illustrates … Read More
My post on contracting by the US states (here) prompted @CherylStephens to inform me on Twitter of this post from a couple of days ago on the UK government blog Digital Marketplace. It’s by Jason Waterman from the Crown Commercial Service and Warren Smith from Government Digital Service, and it’s entitled Working together to design government contracts for the digital age. It’s … Read More
I noted with interest this article on problems with Virginia’s contracting system. I’ll take the liberty of quoting most of it: Virginia’s $6 billion-a-year contracting system has serious flaws — including multi-million dollar contracts managed by untrained staff and contracts that are prepared without legal review, according to a new state report issued Monday. The General Assembly’s watchdog agency, the Joint … Read More
Business Law Today contains an article entitled Data, Contracts, and Making Hard Decisions—Changing the Way We Manage Risk. It’s by Jamie May, associate general counsel at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. I had the pleasure of meeting Jamie a few years ago, when he wore a different hat, and I’ve corresponded with him sporadically. Here’s the first paragraph of Jamie’s article: Contracts … Read More
