Real World Document Drafting®: Form, Style, and Substance
Why Attend?
Learn How To Draft Effective Documents That Protect Your Clients!
Document drafting can be as important to the long-term success of a deal as the negotiation of the deal itself. ALI-ABA's Real World Document Drafting ® : Form, Style, and Substance course examines the legal principles, skills, and underlying business principles related to negotiating and drafting a broad range of contracts. Taught by Marvin Garfinkel, a practitioner with extensive transactional practice and teaching experience, this unique course, available live in Philadelphia or by live video webcast, shows you how to draft precise legal documents that not only articulate the terms of the deal, but also foster business relationships and reduce the risk of future litigation.
What You Will Learn
This comprehensive program integrates the legal principles, skills, and experience related to negotiating and drafting a wide range of contracts and other documents. It explores the underlying principles of contract law that apply to specific contract provisions and considers alternate ways to resolve issues in the document negotiation process. The focus is on producing readily comprehended legal documents that can serve as roadmaps for business relationships and can reduce the possibility of related litigation. Throughout the day, the isntructor will respond to participants' comments and questions.
Topics include:
Preliminary Considerations in Contract Drafting
Use and Misuse of Recitals and Definitions
Good Drafting Practices
Dealing with Potential Ambiguities
Let's Frustrate the Litigators
Default Provisions
Choice of Law and of Forum
Indemnification and Exculpatory Provisions
Consent and Approval Provisions
Warranties and Representations
Alternate Dispute Resolution
Market Shift Accommodation Provisions
and much, much more!
Who Should Attend
Attorneys and other professionals who regularly negotiate and draft documents and want to improve their contract drafting skills should attend this one-of-a-kind webcast.
Faculty
Marvin Garfinkel, Of Counsel at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP in Philadelphia, is an experienced transactional lawyer, who has lectured and chaired courses for ALI-ABA and numerous other organizations. His areas of expertise include real estate law, including financing, defaults and workouts, common interest properties (condominiums, home owner associations, etc.), shopping center and other commercial development and commercial leasing, and business transactions. His intellectual property subspecialties include distribution and licensing relationships and trademarks.
Mr. Garfinkel's extensive writings have been published in legal journals and trade publications. He has advised and served on the editorial boards of a number of legal publications, statutory drafting commissions, and projects, as well as on several Uniform Law drafting and study committees, including those involved in drafting various articles of the UCC. He was an Adviser on several American Law Institute Property Law Restatements. Mr. Garfinkel is the author of the recently published book, Real World Document Drafting: A Dispute-Avoidance Approach (ALI-ABA 2008). For more information about Mr. Garfinkel, visit his website at www.realworlddocs.com.
Special Offer: Attend live in Philadelphia and receive a free copy of the instructor's valuable resource, the second edition of the Real World Document Drafting: A Dispute Avoidance Approach and receive free access to ALI-ABA's on-demand course, Ethics for the Business Lawyer, worth 1 (one) hour of ethics credit in most MCLE states!
The new edition of Mr. Garfinkel's book will be mailed to registrants who attend live in Philadelphia when it is available on or after May 7, and instructions on how to access the Ethics program will be emailed to you early next week (on or after April 26).
Program Schedule
All Times Eastern Daylight
8:30 a.m. Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:00 a.m. Introduction, preliminary considerations, starting out right, drafting=negotiation, understanding the deal and your client, issue identification, third party consents, transaction phases, document format and structure, letters of intent and term sheets, first draft advantages and disadvantages, incorporation by reference, use and misuse of recitals, amendments
10:00 a.m. Use and misuse of definitions, legalese, topographic devices, format and organization of documents, disposition of drafts in progress, significance of negotiation history, good drafting practices, describing time periods, advantages of multiple sentences, avoiding variety and exceptions
11:00 a.m. Break
11:15 a.m. Ambiguities: definition, drafting standard, patent vs. latent ambiguities, syntactical ambiguities, misplaced phrases, ambiguous modifiers, the serial comma - use it, doctrine of the last antecedent
12:15 p.m. Let's Frustrate the Litigators – plain meaning or four corners rule, gap fillers, levels of performance including “best efforts,” good faith, and fair dealing, objective vs. subjective performance criteria
1:15 p.m. Lunch Break
2:15 p.m. Default provisions including “Yellowstone” issue, the incurable default, liquidated, consequential, and punitive damage provisions, and termination and other forfeiture provisions; severance clauses, force majeure, future amendments, oral modification, contracts of adhesions
3:15 p.m. Break
3:30 p.m. Choice of law and of forum, indemnification and exculpatory provisions, consent and approval provisions, warranties and representations, knowledge representations, market shift protection devices, most favored nation clauses, third party offer provisions, anti-waiver provisions, succession provisions, alternate dispute resolution
4:15 p.m. Q&A Session
4:30 p.m. Adjournment
Total 60-minute hours of instruction: 6.0; total 50-minute hours: 7.2.
Here's what registrants have said about this course:
"Excellent course! Mr. Garfinkel is extremely knowledgeable. He made a dry subject interesting."
"I have been drafting contracts for over 15 years without the benefit of a course like yours. A course like yours would have saved me a lot of pain along the way."
"Practical and interesting. It should be a required course for all novice commercial lawyers (and for many experienced lawyers, too)."
Times
Eastern 9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. | Central 8:00 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. | Mountain 7:00 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Pacific & Arizona 6:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. | Alaska 5:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. | Hawaii 3:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
