The BUSKLAW Newsletter

  In my August 2020 newsletter, we discussed lessons from the New York Supreme Court's rejection of the Trump family NDA. Drafting lesson #1 is the need to specifically describe the information covered by the NDA rather than vague references.  Unfortunately for Trump, this lesson wasn't learned, as evidenced by a recent New York U.S. District Court decision in the case of  J essica Denson v Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.   Plaintiff Denson was employed as a national phone bank administrator for the 2016 Trump campaign. Before she was hired, she signed the standard Trump employment contract containing broad non-disclosure and non-disparagement provisions. Confidential Information was defined as: ...all information (whether or not embodied in any media) of a private, proprietary or confidential nature or that Mr. Trump insists remain private or confidential, including, but not limited to, any information with respect to the personal life, political affairs, and/o...

In last month's newsletter, we gave three examples of wordy, unclear, racist, pompous, and dull writing: as an opening sentence to a Bizarro-World version of Stephen King's The Gunslinger , as the beginning of a typical "big law firm"-drafted contract, and bureaucratic (including political) statements. We then compared these monsters of prose to their plain-English versions. But so what? Is poor literary, legal, business, and government writing merely a mote in the eye or something more sinister?  Let's start with bureaucratese . The Trump Administration didn't invent it but surely has taken this dark art to new heights (or depths). And their penchant for typographical errors is a new twist. In this recent  Business Insider article , 84% of 1,043 people surveyed said they would be less likely to trust the government if its communications contained spelling or grammatical mistakes. Specifically addressing Trump's notorious tweets containing such gems ...