Banish "agrees that" from your contracts

By Rick Colosimo / July 17, 2015 / Comments Off on Banish "agrees that" from your contracts

Ken Adams has written a recent post describing the use of “agrees that” in a contract. One steady comment I make to agreements is getting rid of “agrees that” because it’s worse than ambiguous: it’s entirely unclear and likely to be used in distinctly different (and inconsistent) ways in the same contract. “Agrees that” becomes…

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Piles of Contracts

By Rick Colosimo / July 11, 2015 / Comments Off on Piles of Contracts

Man, Ken Adam’s isn’t kidding when he talks about not being impressed by collections of contracts, mostly scraped from EDGAR. I saw a reference to TechAgreements, which I hadn’t heard of before, and now I know why: Here’s a selling point on their page with “Recommended Convertible Notes” (which are all clearly just scraped): “Prepared…

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How to negotiate a document

By Rick Colosimo / May 19, 2015 / Comments Off on How to negotiate a document

This article gives some tips on how to negotiate a contract. While it’s aimed more at business people, it’s awfully close to what lawyers should do. I think almost every document can be fixed in one round of changes, unless there are open business issues that were deliberately left open at the term sheet or…

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Using accounting terms in contracts

By Rick Colosimo / May 3, 2015 / Comments Off on Using accounting terms in contracts

I recently came across a situation where we used “net revenue” in a bonus plan as part of the calculation to determine what the bonus pool would be. In other contracts, we’ve used “net revenue” to distinguish from “revenue” (aka gross revenue) to deduct things like discounts, credits, returns, and so on. In many of…

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