“A committee is a cul-de-sac into which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled” — Sir Barnett Cocks. Much the same can be said about the documents we read and, sadly, write. Sir Cocks didn’t necessarily mean only that ideas were strangled to death. We want to think he also was thinking about damaged survivors, the ones that survived, but with a life-long injury.

Think about the process we follow to create a written agreement, whether that is a lease, an easement, a loan agreement or any of the others we, Ruminators, can list. In most cases, we start with a form written by predecessors. The words in those forms aren’t “ours.” The “voice” isn’t “ours.” In some cases, we cut and paste from a selection of related forms, each with its own voice. Then, we modify this “base” document, adapting it to the deal in front of us. In simple cases, we fill in some blanks, delete some provisions, and add a few. In others, we make significant changes, some to the very core or philosophy of what the form’s original authors had in mind. Our additions might have been written solely from our own thoughts; they are never tabula rasa (def.: an absence of preconceived ideas or predetermined goals); they never are. In fact, our additions often are snippets from something else we or others have written. [Note that we’ve written “authors,” not just author. That’s because our selected foundational document or document very likely was put together in the same way we are describing.] [Read more…]

Sometimes a party has the right to withhold its consent when the other party requires that party’s consent. And, sometimes the right to deny consent is desired to be absolute and unconditional. In such cases, and for a very long time, Ruminations has been using a formulation saying that such consent “may be withheld for any reason or no reason at all.” We just read a June 28, 2019 Supreme Court of Texas decision possibly chastising us for wasting those words. After analyzing a contract provision stating simply that a party could not assign its rights “without the express written consent” of the other, that court wrote that the added words, “for any reason or no reason,” were surplusage. As that court wrote, consent-required provisions with or without the extra words have identical meaning. Accordingly, “the same can be said” as to a provision reading that consent “can be granted or withheld at [a party’s] sole discretion.”

Before every reader starts searching for an eraser to take to their form agreements, there is a caveat. This decision came out of the state of Texas. That’s not going to be the law in every jurisdiction. Also, it was based on the premise that a provision, in an oil and gas “farm-out” agreement saying that one a party could not assign its interest without the other’s consent, is “unambiguous.” [Viewing Wikipedia would tell you that “a farmout agreement is an agreement entered into by the owner of one or more mineral leases, called the ‘farmor,’ and another company who wishes to obtain a percentage of ownership of that lease or leases in exchange for providing services, called the ‘farmee.’”] When a court decides that an agreement’s provision is not ambiguous, it refuses to look outside of the agreement itself to aid in interpreting that provision. It accepts the “plain meaning” of the words. At most, it will refer to a dictionary of its own choice, sometimes, as Ruminations, has noted, one with a definition that supports an already decided conclusion. What a court won’t do is to look at prior discussions or negotiations to aid interpretation. [Read more…]

What is a “reasonable time” for something to happen or to get done? Do we ask this question of ourselves when we use that phraseology in our leases and other agreements? We can’t avoid using concepts such as “reasonable,” “material,” “promptly,” and the like, but are we being as careful as we should be when sprinkling them around?

There are good reasons to use what Ruminations has called “weasel words” or “deliberate ambiguity.” [For earlier thoughts on this subject, click: HERE.] Basically, we don’t always know how long something should or will take, even when diligence is observed and proper efforts (whatever those are) are employed. After all, we may know that the time for something to happen may be affected by adverse weather, but we don’t know whether there will be any such weather. We might know that a particular repair, say a roof replacement, might take 30 days from beginning to end in the summer, but not how long it might take in a winter season five years hence. So, we use “reasonable” when setting a time limit for such work to take place. [Read more…]

Today, we begin with a French lesson. The French word, “renvoi,” means “to return,” in the sense of “sending back.” In law, “Renvoi” is a doctrine, and what follows is why you’ll be pleased to know that.

Last week, we tackled the humdrum, excitement-lacking “boilerplate” of specifying, in a lease or other agreement, an exclusive venue for litigation. What we didn’t even hint at was that just because the parties are obligated to duke it out in a particular jurisdiction doesn’t mean that the law of that jurisdiction will apply to their fight. Often, but not always, parties are free to specify which jurisdiction’s (state’s) law will govern their dispute. As to the location (venue) for the match, though some states will allow contracting parties with no connection to those jurisdictions to avail themselves of that state’s courts, most still require the parties or the subject matter of the dispute to at least “touch” their state. For example, if a loan is made in State X on a property in State Y, but the lender or borrower is in State “Z,” it is likely that each of those three states would allow its courts to hear the dispute. But, which state’s law would apply? A less than comprehensive list of the factors a court will use in deciding to apply the law of a jurisdiction other than its own would be: the parties’ intent, their domiciles, where the lease or other agreement was executed, and where the property is located. In the case of “property,” a secondary analysis is made as to whether the property is primary or secondary to the agreement in front of the court. For example, a personal guaranty of a mortgage loan may only have an attenuated relationship to the property serving as collateral for the loan and the parties are able to call for jurisdiction where either the borrower or lender “resides.” It could also be, but isn’t required to be, where the property is located. [A separate issue is whether a party or either party can be served in other than its “home” state, but we’ll leave that for another day (if ever)]. [Read more…]