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White Space Is Your Friend

When editing a legal agreement, one of the easiest yet most useful tasks you can carry out is to create white space. You do this by taking long paragraphs containing one or more subclauses and breaking them into separate elements using the hard return (in other words, the “Enter”…

Create “Horizontal Consistency” Amongst Your Documents

One common problem with precedent initiatives is the failure to plan for maintaining the collection, once created. The most obvious aspect of this is the failure to address how the language in your agreements, once published, will…

Plain language drafting: Write for your reader

The push for plain language drafting is, of course, nothing new. Joseph Kimble, Emeritus professor at WMU–Cooley Law School, has been writing on the topic for more than 30 years. He has written two books, including Lifting the Fog of Legalese and…

Your Style Guide: A Critical Factor for Success

Although it may not be self-evident, adopting a house style guide is one of the most important things you can have to help improve the overall quality of your documents.

Purpose

One Substantive Issue Per Clause

Among the most important things to do in your drafting is to ensure that every clause addresses one and only one substantive issue.

Avoid confusion

Clear, “Meaty” Clause Captions

Among the most important things to do in your drafting is to insure that every clause has a clear, “meaty” caption (or heading).

Far too often we see either vague or generic captions for clauses. Such an approach makes it much more difficult for the…

Create a Clear, Logical Structure

There are several important but necessary principles you should apply to make your legal agreements better, including using

• plain language
• short, declarative sentences
• clear, descriptive…

Your Base Document: A Key Starting Point

It is important to adopt a “base document” or “boilerplate agreement” that has sample language for the various clauses that commonly occur in your agreements (frequently referred to as boilerplate clauses). There are several significant benefits to doing so…