Ken Adams

Firm/Organization: Adams Contacts Consulting LLC
Blogs: Adams on Contract Drafting

Latest Articles

I love it when I write about something that doesn’t make sense, and caselaw comes along to show that not only does it not make sense, it can also lead to a messy, expensive fight. Today’s topic is the practice of having lawyers sign settlement agreements under the notation APPROVED AS TO FORM AND CONTENT. I wrote about it in this 2008 post, and here’s what MSCD 5.70 says: An unusual aspect of settlement…
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The summer 2019 issue of The Business Lawyer—the law review published by the Business Law Section of the ABA—contains my article Interpreting and Drafting Efforts Provisions: From Unreason to Reason. Go here for a PDF. No one has ever offered an even halfway serious attempt to explain a distinction between different efforts (or endeavours) provisions, or lack of a distinction. Into that void steps this article, “delexicalization,” corpus linguistics, and all. Writing this sort of…
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As promised, go here for information about my 14 November 2019 “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in Seoul, organized by my partner LAWnB, a Thomson Reuters entity. As usual, the registration information is in Korean, but go here for a brochure in English. I’m looking forward to it, of course. I always enjoy my visits to Seoul. Koreans might find of interest my 2014 two-part article in Korean, English Language Contracts: Reducing the Clutter and Confusion…
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Bryan Garner is a big name in legal lexicography, litigation writing, and guidance on general English usage. He has a new book out, on contract drafting. It’s called Garner’s Guidelines for Drafting and Editing Contracts, and it’s not good. But first, why write a review? Because using any reference work requires a leap of faith, and book reviews help readers decide whether a leap of faith is justified. But I’ve made a career out…
I noted with interest an article entitled “Including Without Limitation” (in this issue of The Transactional Lawyer), by Stephen L. Sepinuck of Gonzaga University School of Law. I’ll discuss later in this post the part about including without limitation. But let’s start with what is for me the more interesting part—the last two columns, in particular the following description of collateral: All of Borrower’s red fruits, including, without limitation, tomatoes. Does the collateral include tomatoes…
It’s been a long time since I’ve offered you an effed-up way to impose an obligation on the subject of a sentence. With that in mind, I now proudly present *drum roll* hereby binds itself to! Mostly, hereby binds itself to is used as a needless variant of hereby assumes all obligations under, or some such. But here are some examples from EDGAR where it’s used to express an obligation: If any Subcontractor fails to…
The title of this post sounds aspirational, rather like “A chicken in every pot.” But it’s not: instead, it’s how I conduct my “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars. I suppose at some seminars the speaker introduces you to their approach to something, with the seminar acting as a teaser. If you like the seminar, you have the option of investing in more of whatever the speaker has to offer. That’s not the way…
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I’ve had my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 for three and a half years. It’s a travel laptop, and it’s been perfect for what I do. It’s light, so humping it around the world hasn’t been a problem. It’s plenty powerful and capacious. And I’ve used it in tablet form to do PowerPoint presentations for my “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars. Using it for seminars is particularly nifty. With my Surface pen, I annotate my text-heavy PowerPoint…
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Behold the following “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars: Mumbai, 10 October 2019 Kuala Lumpur, 15 October 2019 (details to come) Singapore, 16 October 2019 Hong Kong, 18 October 2019 Dubai, 21 October 2019 Tokyo, 12 November 2019 Seoul, 14 November 2019 (details to come) Add to that my 28 and 29 October seminars in Toronto (details to come), my 5 November seminar in London, and my 7 November seminar in…
Below is the signature page from a Courtyard Marriott group sales agreement I found online. I know next to nothing about electronic signatures, but I found decidedly odd the e-signature process specified in this contract. “Replace Empty Box with Blackened Box Here to Enter Into Binding Obligation”? And check out the note at the bottom about how you can do it using Word. Can anyone explain this to me and where it fits in electronic-signature…