Last week I attended a debate entitled “Dysfunction in Contract Drafting: Are the Courts, Law Firms, and Company Law Departments Stuck in a Rut?“.

I’m certain that this topic will resonate with many readers 😉 so this post collects together various related links.

The distinguished panel included:

• Ken Adams, expert on contract drafting and author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting (3rd ed. 2013, American Bar Association). Ken has featured on this blog several times – see this guest post on “shall”, and this on problematic terms of art;
•  The Honourable Mr Justice Flaux, QC, a judge of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales;
•  Kate Gibbons, a Finance and Capital Markets Partner at Clifford Chance;
•  and Kristin McFetridge, a Chief Counsel for British Telecommunications plc, qualified in both New York and England.
• The panel was moderated by Mark Anderson, a visiting professor at UCL Laws, author or general editor of six textbooks, and legal practitioner.

For further details on the panel see here.

The debate was organised by UCL’s Faculty of Laws in central London, but thanks to technology, you can watch the recorded debate.

The debate was quite heated. 😉

Ken opened by critiquing an extract from a contract, and you can read more about that here.

The Law Society Gazette found material for their pithy headline “Contract lawyers are ‘copy and paste monkeys‘” – read more here.

If “nouny gerunds” 🙂 pique your interest, see Ken’s take here; and for his views on effecting change at UK law firms, see here.

Finally, here is an article by the panel moderator, Mark Anderson, in August this year in the run-up to the debate, entitled “Contract drafters: don’t be complacent“.