WELCOME

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Transactional Practice Today, a newsletter focusing on transactional law practice.  I am hoping that it will be of interest to practicing lawyers (particularly junior lawyers), professional development

and training professionals, and academics involved with the teaching of transactional skills and subjects.   The newsletter will come out every two months.  (An aside:  as an example of the kind of linguistic pitfall that transactional lawyers face, I was going to use the word "bimonthly" in the preceding sentence until a dictionary review told me that it can mean either every two months or twice a month!)

To get a sense of the kinds of topics that will be covered, please see the sidebars to the left detailing today's articles and some of the topics that will be covered in upcoming issues.  If you have any ideas about possible topics, or would like to submit something for inclusion, please let me know at cfox@foxprof.com. Thank you.

Charles Fox

Six tips for more effective proofreading

For newer lawyers who are still struggling with the rigor with which senior lawyers require documents to be perfect, six tips for reviewing documents:

1.    Eliminate pride of authorship.  Most of us fall in love with what we write, whether it's poetry or an officer's certificate.  Don't fall into this trap:  turn your heart to stone.  Imagine that the work product that you are reviewing was drafted by your worst enemy, and each error that you find sends him or her to a deeper circle of hell.

2. Let as much time pass as possible between drafting something and reviewing it.  This will make it easier to follow tip no. 1.  So, if you are asked on Tuesday to prepare a first draft of an agreement for review by a senior lawyer on Thursday, don't wait until Wednesday night to draft it:  if possible, draft it on Tuesday and review it at the end of the day on Wednesday.

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Transactional education:  what's next?

I recently attended and spoke at "Transactional Education: What's Next?" a conference hosted by Emory University Law School and its Center for Transactional Law and Practice on June 4^th and 5^th.  The answer to the question posed by the conference's title is mixed:  according to the Center's Executive Director Tina Stark in her opening remarks, practical transactional learning at American law schools is advancing at a rapid pace but is still at a stage that compares with where practical litigation learning was 20 years ago.  As an example of the uphill climb faced by academics in this area, Tina reported that the AALS (Association of American Law Schools) has just recently agreed to consider an application to make transactional practice a provisional section of the organization (there are currently more than 90 sections).  It was clear to me from the panels I observed, however, that there is a strong base of dedicated and talented teachers who are driving significant progress in this area.  The fact that law firms are increasingly pressuring law schools to prepare law students better for the real practice of law can only act as an accelerant to this process.

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Contract drafting:  the perils of imperfect plagiarism

People like me who teach contract drafting all advocate the same basic principles:  clarity, simplicity and precision.  Everyone who drafts contracts for a living grasps these precepts, consciously or implicitly.  Why, then, are so many contracts excessively long, confusing, and bloated with redundancy, anachronisms and bloviation?  Is it because (as some cynical clients suggest) lawyers are paid by the word?  Is it because lawyers are so averse to risk that they are unwilling to make any changes to forms that have been handed down through the ages?  Or are we just lazy?

For a thought-provoking examination of this phenomenon, please click here to read Why Contracts are Written in "Legalese," 77 Chicago-Kent Law Review 59 (2002) by Claire Hill, click here