Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Brevity

At work I've been updating our retention agreement for outside counsel. This led me to read some materials on legal drafting (specifically the work of Bryan Garner, familiar to many law students). I know it's geeky, but I find it extremely satisfying to edit contracts in this way. I cut down Sun's retention agreement by 2 pages! Same info, fewer words. And turning a giant, impenetrable paragraph into a second-person, outline-format provision? Exquisite.

My problem now is that once I started looking at agreements through that lens, it was really hard to turn it off. No agreement was safe - at work, for my fiance's company, etc. My fiance finally put his foot down when I begged him to let me redline the license agreement for our wedding venue.