Quick Corporate Lawyer Tip for Contract Drafting

I've practiced corporate law for over 20 years and I still work on perfecting my craft.
One area of my practice I spend a significant amount of time working on is contract drafting. Language is inherently ambiguous and meaning is always changing. As lawyers, being able to wield language and write better contracts make our lives easier and allows us to deliver a higher quality, more air-tight product to clients.
Non-lawyers refer to lawyer speak as legalese for a reason. Often, contracts and terms are so technically dense that they are difficult to understand. And, sometimes that ambiguity serves a purpose.
However, I challenge you to examine the verbose language in your contracts. I think you'll find, as I have, that contracts are unnecessarily wordy because that's just the way things have always been phrased.
Here's where you can find the book I constantly refer to in my own practice:
A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting by Kenneth Adams
www.amazon.com...
Be sure to leave me your comments, questions or video suggestions!
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Brett A. Cenkus has 20+ years of experience in business law, finance, and entrepreneurship. Through Cenkus Law, PC, he provides advice and services for mergers & acquisitions (M&A), securities offerings, founders’ agreements, and other general business law issues.
Through Braaten Woods, LLC, Brett helps business owners in the lower middle market ($2MM - $25MM) position themselves for sale, find buyers, negotiate, and close M&A deals.
Brett also maintains merger-resources.com, a site packed with free articles, videos, checklists, deal diagrams, template contracts, and other tools to help pass M&A knowledge to others.
Brett regularly consults with entrepreneurs and invests his own capital as an angel investor.
From 2010-2013, Brett served as Chief Legal Counsel of a publicly-traded international oilfield services company. From 2001 to 2006, he and a partner founded and built Paragon Residential Mortgage. Bridge Investments acquired Paragon in 2006.
Brett holds a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania.
Brett lives in Austin with his wife, Cathryn, and two children. He enjoys reading, squash, classic movies, great food and wine, and the New England Patriots.
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