Easter highlights from IP Draughts

With apologies to readers in those countries that don’t celebrate Easter this weekend, IP Draughts has been back through the archives of this blog to find interesting articles from previous Easter weekends.

In April 2017, we asked the question, Whose Job Is It To Check Contract Schedules? The article comments on an English High Court case that considered this question. Answer: principally the client’s management consultants, PwC, who provided the schedules in question. As the judge commented in the case:

There is no doubt that it was sloppy work by PwC, the management consultants and, to a lesser extent, by Ms Brittlebank [of Dentons], the solicitor. PwC’s error is perhaps a sad reflection of the fact that modern day contracts of this kind are so complicated that nobody (not even the consultants) bothers to check the actual documentation being signed.

In March 2016 (Easter was early that year), we considered a question that is now very topical, namely the rights that a government has to acquire IP rights from a private entity, particularly in times of national emergency. March-in to glory considered certain US and UK laws that enabled governments to make pharmaceutical products. IP Draughts returned to this subject more recently, in the context of Covid 19 and UK laws, here.

In April 2014 we were lazy. Rather than write a book review ourselves, we simply linked to one written by IP Draughts’ friend Ken Adams. The link is here and the review is about a book that IP Draughts found fascinating: The Three and a Half Minute Transaction: Boilerplate and the Limits of Contract Design. The book reports on research into why the legal and commercial sectors working the field of sovereign debt persisted in using a boilerplate clause known as a pari passu clause, despite a court decision indicating that the clause meant the opposite of what people in the sector thought it meant. Short answer: an odd mixture of taking comfort with the familiar, and an indifference to technical legal issues, even among many lawyers.

In April 2012, we allowed our disappointment to show, in a discussion of the poor quality of the template agreements used by the UK National Health Service for clinical trials. Bad typos in contracts: taking the f off discussed certain inconsistences in those agreements (some of which have since been corrected). Come to think of it, this would be a good example to use in his Contract Drafting Skills Workshop, where he discusses four Cs of good contract drafting: Clarity, Correctness (Accuracy), Conciseness and Consistency.

This blog has now been running for over 9 years – its 10th anniversary will be next March. There is plenty of old but good material in the larder. It’s well worth a rummage!