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The Perils of Revising Word Templates: An Example from a Recent Lawsuit

That one-man legal-research machine Steven Sholk informed me of the California Court of Appeal’s decision in Vespremi v. Tesla Motors, Inc. (go here for a PDF copy). The part that caught Steven’s eye was the court’s discussion of the following provision in the employment agreement of one of the plaintiffs (the employment agreement of the other plaintiff contained the same … Read More

Rigorous Crowdsourced Contracts? It Ain’t Happening!

In this April 2010 post on AdamsDrafting I explained why I thought the notion of an crowdsourced initiative to create contract templates wouldn’t be viable. But seeing as this idea has recently been discussed in this post on Bill Carlton’s Counselor@Law blog and in the comments to this post on Brian Rogers’s theContractsGuy blog, I thought there might be some … Read More

Seeking Law-Firm Content Partners

Last month I suggested in this post that trade groups might benefit from partnering with Koncision to produce document-assembly versions of their template contracts. In the same vein, here’s how a partnership with Koncision would benefit any law firm looking to develop document-assembly templates: The development process would take about a quarter of the time that it would otherwise. Koncision … Read More

“Definitive Agreement”

[Updated 11:30 a.m. EDT, May 6: Getting rid of “definitive transaction” in the language I offered in the previous post caused me to get carried away, and Chris’s comment below has caused me to reverse course. A letter of intent that contains binding confidentiality provisions but is otherwise not binding could conceivably be described as “providing for” a transaction. I … Read More

Early Reactions to Koncision

Here are three early reactions to launch of Koncision’s first product: Sean Doherty checked out Koncision and wrote about it in an extensive Law Technology News article entitled “Koncision Answers ‘Where’s the Content?’ for ContractExpress.com” (go here). Sean summed things up as follows: If you generate a number of NDAs that require variation on a regular basis, then Koncision contract … Read More

More Litigation Regarding Claims Covered

Chris Lemens pointed out to me this item on Lexology. (Free registration required, I think.) It’s by Michael S. Melbinger of Winston & Strawn, and it describes a recent decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals regarding a forum-selection provision in an employment agreement. Here’s the forum-selection provision: The parties agree that all claims or causes of action relating … Read More

Now Offering In-House “Structure of M&A Contracts” Seminar

Hot on the heels of rollout of my webcast with Steven Davidoff, I’m now offering an in-house seminar built around my book The Structure of M&A Contracts. Over the course of 2.5 hours, we’ll review the key topics, then consider a stripped-down contract cunningly edited to raise issues that the buyer or the seller would want to spot. In a … Read More

I Don’t Do “Agree to Disagree”

Recently I had an email exchange with someone who has a different view of how to put contract drafting on an efficient footing. He closed our exchange by noting, genially, that “we’ll agree to disagree.” But he evidently mistook me for someone more easygoing! Progress requires that good ideas prevail over not-so-good ideas. I do my best to come up … Read More

Now Only $50 to Use Koncision’s NDA Template for a Single Transaction!

We’ve reduced from $195 to $50 the cost of subscribing to Koncision’s confidentiality-agreement template for purposes of creating a contract for a single transaction. This subscription option will give you access to the template for three days.  To subscribe, go here [link no longer available]. We’re taking this step because we want to make it easy for you to see … Read More

Reasonableness and Good Faith in Contracts

In my recent post on moral turpitude, I noted that I found odd the phrase “its reasonable but good faith opinion.” I thought I should take a more general look at the relationship between those two concepts. In this post, I considered a side issue—use of reasonable and reasonably. Now it’s time to address the main questions: When should you … Read More