Prose contract drafting

Prose is legal document drafting software built from the ground up to create professionally styled contracts with less errors, in a shorter time frame. The book explains the contract drafting process in terms of content and style, demonstrating through authentic examples how to revise template. With this book as a resource at their fingertips, a contract drafter will be well equipped to create powerful, to-the-point prose in transactional practice.

This involves following some basic rules: Don’t put the definition section at the front of the body of the contract. If that sentence doesn’t make any sense to you, then this post is for you. It tells a story of how the IT industry solved a problem which the legal industry currently faces, and how the solution from the IT industry applies equally well to the legal industry.

It also happens to be our origin story. Legal drafting is a core competency for most lawyers, yet it is the skill for which lawyers are least prepared. Because drafting has not been widely taught, most lawyers need to take definitive steps to sharpen their drafting skills. Contract Drafting : Powerful Prose in Transactional Practice, Third Edition offers an expansive approach to studying the transactional lawyer’s responsibilities as contract drafter. Garner is the legal drafter trusted by more than three dozen Fortune 5companies to revise their major contracts.

I suggest it’s also broadly representative of BigLaw drafting generally, in the UK and the US. A premarital agreement is a contract between prospective spouses made in contemplation of marriage. Prose facilitates faster turnarounds, greater client satisfaction, and a higher quality end product.

It is an art of bringing intentions of contractual parties together in one place and putting them on paper. All lawyers should be fluent in this art because all lawyers. Practitioner-oriented treatises examine the legal and business context of transactions. Drafting guides describe various types of agreements and clauses and explain their usage.

Sample documents (forms and precedents) facilitate the drafting process, and checklists ensure that all steps in a transaction have been completed. Clear contract prose Use clear language in your contracts. Any given English-language business contract will likely be riddled with the deficient usages that characterize traditional contract language – flagrant archaisms, redundancy, botched use of verbs, and so on. Contract - Drafting Resources See Exhibit A for a list of my recommended contract - drafting resources.

SUMMARY OF BASIC CONCEPTS See Exhibit B for summary tables setting forth the typical “anatomy” of a contract and categories of contract - drafting language. MORE ADVANCED CONCEPTS A. Real Estate, Landlord Tenant, Estate Planning, Power of Attorney, Affidavits and More! All Major Categories Covered. Bob signs the draft, without modifying it, and returns it to Alice.

The parties perform their obligations under the contract. Later, in litigation, the parties are unable to find any copy of the contract that was signed by Alice. Note that understanding what the parties intended is different than understanding why they intended it.

Of Lesser Importance.

And this is the core value proposition of Prose: Draft a contract faster and smarter by streamlining and automating essential parts of the drafting process, without ever compromising on quality. The goal when drafting contracts should be to draft every sentence with precision such that only one possible interpretation follows—the interpretation the drafter intends. You should aim to avoid any ambiguity in the contract.

Below are some tips to keep in mind that can add clarity when drafting a contract. The traditional prose of contracts is dysfunctional. A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting contains 6pages covering all sorts of issues, some of them big, some smaller.

But the net cumulative effect of addressing all the sources of dysfunctional prose has a big impact. Not all of these sins are really deadly. Some are merely embarrassing.

Others, however, carry real risks for clients and lawyers.