A Manual of Style For the Drafting of Contracts

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A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting is such a beautifully ironic title — rather like writing How to be Cool in Comic Sans — that we can’t resist wondering how much more clumsy its title might have been had Ken Adams had the chutzpah — or the basic sense of irony that he seems to lack — to really push the boat out.

Mr. Adams ploughs a lonely furrow fighting the good fight for clear and elegant drafting and, as he goes, is surrounded on all sides by American attorneys whose intellectual energies are largely expended on making simple ideas complicated, and thus we are grateful to him for it and raise our glass — it is no small matter to dedicate 27 pages to the topic of why one should write “states” rather than “represents and warrants”, and even then not entirely convince — even if, for the self-same reason, he might not be your natural first choice to be stuck next to at the ABA’s annual contract draftsperson’s gala dinner.

See also

• Representations and warranties
• That dreadful FT book about derivatives (not written by Mr. Adams, but somehow comparable in tone, price, heft at utility.)