25 years of Drafting and Negotiating Commercial Contracts

Yesterday, IP Draughts returned home to find that a courier had delivered a heavy cardboard box. It contained his free copies of the 5th edition of Drafting and Negotiating Commercial Contracts, in their emerald green livery. Publishing websites, such as Amazon, had indicated that it would be published next Monday (13 February), but he had thought that optimistic. The timelines for printing books are much shorter than they were when the first edition was published, 25 years ago.

IP Draughts signs and dates a first copy of each of his books. He dated the first copy of the first edition “17.12.97”. The printing of that edition was …problematic. A young editor had failed to notice that the contents pages omitted any mention of chapter 6. It was too late to fix the problem, other than by circulating an erratum slip. At the time, it seemed to IP Draughts like a major disaster. With hindsight, he suspects very few people would have noticed.

The fifth edition runs to 472 pages, compared with 268 in the first. New material in the latest edition includes a chapter on terminating contracts.

Although the book is intended for practising lawyers and commercial managers, IP Draughts was pleased to learn recently that it is used as a text in an advanced contract module, by a law lecturer at the University of Sussex. He would be delighted to hear of any other examples of his books being used in teaching.

While IP Draughts wrote the first edition alone, the fifth edition is mostly the work of his co-author, Victor Warner. Thanks are due to their colleagues: Stefano Incarbone, who assisted with research, and Christina Turner, Genny Armstrong and Joshua Billingham, who assisted with proof-reading. Any errors of substance or typography that remain are the sole responsibility of the authors.

And yes, the contents pages do mention chapter 6, which discusses (as it did in the first edition) the interpretation of contracts by the courts.