We’ve always been a little murky as to whether a successor landlord always becomes obligated to pay renewal commissions to the original broker responsible for the presence of an existing tenant. After all, there is no actual agreement between that later landlord and the broker whose original commission agreement calls for the payment of a renewal commission. The broker can’t point to where it and the successor landlord “shook hands.”
But, it is pretty common for leases themselves to include provisions such as: [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?
Can you make a list of the institutions or people who employ “Make ‘em up as you go along” rules? To get the thinking process going, try bank tellers or low-level government employees. E.g.: Teller: “You need to include your middle name in the signature used to endorse that check. It’s a bank rule.” You: “But, that wouldn’t be my signature. I don’t sign my name that way. That’s my rule.” Who wins?
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.
A 25-page court decision out of the Supreme Court of British Columbia has triggered today’s blog posting. The decision describes a convoluted, time-extended, back-and-forth negotiation over a set of interrelated, broker-prepared offers to buy and sell. In that marketplace, such documents signed by the offering party and “accepted” by the other one become “contracts of sale and purchase.” The back and forth with these documents began in early February, After a number of handwritten changes and the addition of a couple of pages, they were finally “accepted” in late July.
Guilty! Ruminations and its author have done this, though we’ve long been conscious of its flaws. What is “this”? It is that we’ve criticized documents prepared by others when we “weren’t there.” Before we proceed with today’s rant, a small clarification is in order. There will be no apology for our pointing out unnecessarily vague or ambiguous language. In fact, we think there is a place for intentional ambiguity and remain firmly behind the thoughts we expressed seven years ago in a piece titled: The Artful Use of Intentional Ambiguity in Document Drafting. It can be seen by clicking: 
We’ve been doing Ruminations since 2011 and yet this is the first time we’ve deliberately done a multi-topic blog posting. Generally, when we choose a topic (400+ thus far) we dig in and treat(?) our readers to several pages of our ramblings. That approach has precluded our covering simple or easily contained topics, ones undeserving of deep drilling down. So, today, for the first time (but, perhaps not the last), we present a little of this and a little of that.
Some concepts are so simple that we never think that we’d have to point them out. But, today, one of those concepts occurred to us, and we’d like to share it with our readers. Here it is:
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