Yesterday I had an exchange on Twitter with Pam Chestek, aka @pchestek, proprietor of the Property, Intangible blog. (You’ll see next month my article that sprang from a fruitful discussion I had with Pam a few months ago.) Yesterday’s exchange was prompted by my post on paid-up and royalty-free (here), but it strayed into the role of clarity in contracts. … Read More
Via this post by @bobambrogi, I learned that Adobe has made public a 30-page document called The Adobe Legal Department Style Guide, to encourage others to use it and adapt it for their own legal departments and law firms. Here’s why I’m writing about it: This document applies to all In-House Legal Department communication and documents, but has a special focus … Read More
Last year, while I was at a prominent law firm to do a seminar, someone from the law firm emphasized to me that they don’t use standard templates. Instead, they want their junior lawyers to figure out for themselves what should be in a given contract. I thought of that when I read the following in Milgrim on Licensing, at § 10.00: … Read More
Last month I noticed with interest this article by Carol McAlice Currie in the Statesman Journal. It’s entitled “House Passes Bill to Standardize Oregon Contracts.” I recommend that you read the entire article, but here’s the gist of it: Building on a promise to bring more transparency and accountability to government, Rep. Nancy Nathanson delivered on it this week when the … Read More
[Updated June 30, 2015: Here’s an update from Blake: In our job search, we stated that knowledge of MSCD was a “preferred qualification.” Out of dozens of qualified applicants, we narrowed the pool to four people. We gave all four candidates a “homework” assignment of drafting a contract in accordance with MSCD. (We assigned the candidates random numbers and graded … Read More
Yesterday Tim Cummins of the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management posted this item on his blog. It’s on the need for change in contracts, a subject Tim writes about regularly. Tim is used to my nagging, so I permit myself the following thoughts. Tim’s post was prompted by a recent IACCM webinar on the new ASC606 revenue recognition standard. … Read More
I noted with interest this post by Ken Grady on Seyfarth Shaw’s Seytlines blog, particularly as last year I did a Q&A with Ken on this blog (here). Ken’s post is about quality in contracting. He starts by discussing the limitations of determining quality by proxy. As he says, “Trusting the brand, versus trusting metrics that measure desired characteristics, is … Read More
Here’s the opening of this Gigaom story, by Stacey Higginbotham: One of the biggest roadblock to adopting the public cloud for Rich Roseman, former CIO at 21st Century Fox had nothing to do with bandwidth, vendor-lock in or security. It had to do with lawyers. Specifically, old lawyers who couldn’t adapt their contracts to the new world of the cloud. … Read More
I’m in the habit of dividing the task of contract drafting into determining what to say and how to say it. But that’s not to suggest that they represents separate tasks. Instead, they’re two ends of a spectrum, as how you say something can affect what you say in unexpected ways. And you work on both aspects concurrently. But I’d … Read More
In the early days of my rummaging through the entrails of contract language, I logged a lot of time with the second edition of Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. My recent visits have been fewer, but I did turn to the third edition, now called Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, to see if it had anything to say … Read More
