A participant at a recent “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar sent me an email saying how much they had enjoyed the seminar. They went on to say that “incorporating the concepts into our templates and drafting will require a slow, steady cultural change.” Regardless of whether cultural change has to be slow and steady, I suggest that it doesn’t reflect reality … Read More
I used to use King Arthur organic all-purpose flour for all my baking. Now I use King Arthur only for bread and pizza; for cakes and pastries, I’ve switched to Gold Medal all-purpose flour. Why? Because Stella Parks (@BraveTart) recommends Gold Medal. When it comes to baking sweet things, what @BraveTart recommends, I do, with a salute and a smile on … Read More
I’ve update this site’s page for A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting (here) to make it clear that the ABA’s e-book version is now available. Go to this page of the ABA Web Store and click on the print or e-book option, as you prefer. In a few months the fourth edition should be available on Kindle and iBooks.
I feel it’s my civic duty to keep you posted of Glenn West’s latest offerings. There’s his post What Is the Deal with No-Oral-Modification/Waiver Clauses? And there’s his most recent post, Avoiding the Mindless Use of the Brainless MAC Clause. Here’s the gist of the latter: In negotiating carve-outs, bear in mind that not including a carve-out for a particular circumstance when … Read More
In a stream of posts over the past couple of months, I’ve been nagging companies about their contracts. It boils down to something like this: It’s likely your contracts are a mess. That matters. Do you have the time and expertise to fix the problem? What are you going to do? The response has pretty much been silence. I’ve been … Read More
You might have noticed that with the fourth edition of MSCD in production, I’ve been pondering where things stand and what comes next. As part of that I’ve made a point of having slightly awkward conversations with some in-house lawyers who are friends of MSCD. I look at their templates, point out the inevitable shortcomings, then see what they have … Read More
That post about among other things (here)? I’ll now make a similar point about etc. Using etc. is never great. It’s casual, so it unsuited to the limited and stylized world of contract prose. But more to the point, etc. is either redundant, in which case you can get rid of it, or it’s not redundant, which case it’s potentially … Read More
Here’s one of my recent tweets: Tonight's clunky contract usage: (sub)licensees. You may now resume your normal programming. — Ken Adams (@AdamsDrafting) December 13, 2016 I followed it up with this one: Anyone think of another instance of parentheses being used like this? Only example I know of is "(s)" to express the concept "one or more". https://t.co/qg8Nn1MCCq — Ken … Read More
You can now register for the remaining 2016 “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in the United States. The full list is here, but to make life easy for you, here it is: Morristown, NJ, 9 June Seattle, WA, 23 June Boston, MA, 15 September Indianapolis, IN, 22 September Washington, DC, 6 October Minneapolis, MN, 27 October New York, NY, 3 November San Francisco, CA, 8 … Read More
Law reviews—student-run journals that operate out of law schools—are odd institutions that have come in for a good deal of criticism. (I added to that with this 2015 post.) But one potentially worthwhile feature of law reviews is that they provide students with the opportunity to write a “note” and have it selected to be published. But it can be challenging to … Read More
