The BUSKLAW Newsletter

  Children's literature can provide unique insights into best practices and procedures related to my legal specialty: business and technology contracts. Consider Bilbo Baggins's frustration when faced with a contract rife with legal jargon in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, a subject that my colleague Michael Braem and I wrote about here . Or how about using Lewis Carroll's  Alice in Wonderland  to discuss - and refute - curious excuses for legal jargon in this Michigan Bar Journal article . And in J.M. Barrie's  Peter Pan , we hear Peter accuse the ineffectual Captain Hook of being a codfish, causing the old pirate Smee to consider if the brigands have been captained by a codfish, adding "it's lowerin' to our pride." Let's talk about leadership in the context of organizational contract management. In my experience, many companies - large and small - don't grasp the importance of the careful and continuous tending of their contracts. They are ...

In contracts, words are weapons. A lawyer who effectively drafts contracts will make careful word choices because the client's fate often depends on it. And every word in a contract has meaning: two recent cases support that truth.  First, we have Heimer v. Companion Life Insurance Co. , a 6th Circuit Court of Appeals decision issued just a few days ago. One Beau Heimer got drunk with his friends, but they all decided to take their motorbikes off-road for even more fun. Unfortunately, Beau collided with one of his pals and suffered major injuries; the medical expenses to put Beau back into some semblance of order exceeded $200,000.00. Beau filed a claim with Companion Insurance, but they declined to pay. Why? Because the vehicle insurance policy that they issued to Beau contained an exclusion for the illegal use of alcohol .  Beau's attorney was crafty. He argued that Beau didn't illegally use alcohol. Beau was not a minor and didn't drink in defiance of a court ...

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."  Thus begins Stephen King's epic story of the gunslinger, Roland Deschain, and the popular Dark Tower series of novels describing his adventures. But King didn't have to write this sentence that way; he could have consulted with the typical lawyer, politician, or company PR department first. Had he done so, the sentence may have appeared so: "The bad hombre who was dressed mostly in dark clothing and running fast across an arid land was pursued by a multi-armed, extremely dangerous, and notorious vigilante." The difference in these two sentences is clear. King's concise short sentence creates an image that grabs the reader's attention and raises provocative questions. Who is the man in black? Who is the gunslinger? Why is he after the man in black? But the Bizarro World Stephen King sentence - with its ethnic slur, passive voice, ambiguity, suppositions, and supe...