I just read Ken Adam’s post on AI review of legal documents. In the case of services that offer contract templates, if I don’t know who prepared a template, I’m not going to trust it. Even if I do know, I’ll be skeptical unless given good reason not to be. I had this exact comment…

Here’s a pair of instructive quotes, ostensibly about code: Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares.” – Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship This is what I see when I look at contracts. And processes. And business models. Caring doesn’t scale. #StartupRules It was the…

Ken Adams has a recent blog post with some pictures of contracts with “Read Before Signing” written in by the signature block. The idea is likely that someone trying to enforce the contract later, against a claim by the person who signed saying “I didn’t read it, and I didn’t agree to something in there,”…

One of the easiest ways to improve the readability of your contracts is to use shorter sentences. I don’t even mean that you have to trim each sentence. If all you do is turn compound sentences into two sentences, you will help the reader. In addition, by eliminating coordinating conjunctions, you clarify the meaning of…

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…

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…

Here’s an excerpt from a website terms of service I just read: [Please confirm whether users can submit content such as comments, blog posts, etc.] In order to make our Services more dynamic and useful, we may allow you to post comments or reviews or other Submissions to the Services and our forums. The bracketed…

I recently came across this language (unaltered) in a contract: The Parties understand and agree that all Confidential Information (i) is to be preserved and protected; (ii) is not to be disclosed or made available, directly or indirectly, to anyone other than Authorized Employees, including, without limitation, third parties or unauthorized employees for purposes unrelated…

This post by Ken Adams on improvements to the Series Seed documents (Github versions) triggered a lengthy response from me. It’s no secret that I’ve been fond of the project since its earliest days (see this post on the “simple Series A” and this one on “check the box forms,” my idea from around 2001…