In this recent post I discussed some habits that businesses can adopt to increase their contract hygiene. These practices, which can improve a business’s health, are inexpensive and effective, yet often neglected.
To recap, the first three habits are:
Thanks to a bout of insomnia and a shot of motivation I was able to tackle a few improvements to the blog recently. Here’s a quick summary.
Out with the native Squarespace comment system and in with Disqus! I made the switch for back-end management convenience, to reduce issues readers had when posting comments, and to simplify the commenting process. Now you can comment via Facebook, Twitter, and Disqus logins. [continue reading…]
I’ve long thought that the “battle of the forms” is easy to lose but impossible to win. That’s the perspective of a commercial attorney who approaches the issue from the front end—where the battlefield consists solely of varied hypothetical future situations. A litigator on one side or the other, of course, wins each battle that goes to trial.
The battle of the forms refers to the common practice of doing business via purchase and sale documents containing “small print” boilerplate and the interaction of each party’s boilerplate in determining the actual contract terms. [continue reading…]
How can you increase communication and mutual understanding between contracting parties? In a comment to this post in Tim Cummins’s Commitment Matters blog, Dick Locke of the Global Procurement Group states, “The most important method is to minimize the amount of your contract that lawyers write.”
I was stunned when I read that. If it’s true, it’s a sad commentary on the performance of commercial attorneys. [continue reading…]
Although most businesses would prefer to require advance payment in full, it is probably safe to say that extending trade credit is more common. Providing credit terms is often required to win the business, but prudent businesses first conduct a level of due diligence that is appropriate for the amount of money at risk. This post at Allbusiness.com has some practical tips for adopting a credit policy and conducting basic due diligence.
“As few as 50% of restaurant workers wash their hands.” I was introduced to that disturbing stat during a presentation about some sort of high-tech handwashing tracking device that could monitor which employees were washing their hands. I’m not sure whether it was mounted to the sink or the soap dispenser or exactly how it worked—I was a bit distracted by the thought that the folks who worked at my favorite restaurants might be on the wrong half of the curve.
This had an oddly familiar ring to it. A simple practice, inexpensive, effective. Yet often neglected. Just like the contracting practices of a lot of businesses. [continue reading…]
Ever wonder why governing law provisions in contract boilerplate include a variation of the parenthetical “without giving effect to such state’s conflicts of law principles”? The answer is renvoi, which could result in the application of the laws of a state other than that chosen by the parties if the chosen state’s conflicts of law principles are followed.
The Reading List—a regular feature of theContractsGuy—highlights blogs that are interesting enough that I check in regularly.
Ken Adams, the author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, began publishing The Koncise Drafter in December 2010. The blog is the successor to Adams’s widely-followed AdamsDrafting blog (“same pointy-headed contract stuff, different URL”). Adams moved his on-line forum to The Koncise Drafter when he launched Koncision Contract Automation (the website at least, if not yet the service), which will offer a subscription document-assembly service combining contract templates developed by Koncision with document assembly technology offered by ContractExpress. [continue reading…]
Welcome to the inaugural post of theContractsGuy blog. Here is a little background about the person behind the blog and a broad-strokes description of what I have planned for future posts. One regular feature of the blog will be “the Reading List,” a spot highlighting a legal blog of interest. Be sure to subscribe to theContractsGuy RSS feed or check back Friday to see the first installment of the Reading List.
This blog is a project of Brian Rogers, a corporate attorney licensed in Missouri and Illinois and practicing in St. Louis as a partner at Evans & Dixon, L.L.C. [continue reading…]
theContractsGuy is in pre-launch mode. The first post is expected in January 2011.
