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.
There were a few issues with the wording of the three separate “contracts,” one for each of the three properties being sold. We will focus on two of those “issues,” but will describe all those we think the court described.
One of the main issues had to do with the way the buyer’s name was shown. It appeared in multiple places in each contract. The actual buyer’s name included the word “Investment,” but the broker who first prepared the documents wrote “Development.” Fortunately, for the sake of sanity, the buyer noticed these errors and made corrections, but just not thoroughly enough. By way of example, the name printed above the buyer’s signature line in one of the contracts read “Development” when it should have read “Investment.” Both companies actually existed and they, in fact, were related entities. [Read more…]
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:
Let’s get out in the world. Let’s leave our silos. Let’s break through the real estate bubble. What is Ruminations babbling about? Real property law is not an island unto itself. It is part of the entire body of law. Yet, even those few of us who search for “real” law don’t often look at what courts say in other areas. There are things that can be learned by leaving the real estate tent to see how the rest of the (law) world lives. Today’s blog posting could show why we need to take such strolls. It describes a court decision about how to interpret a seemingly unambiguous trust document. There’s a story behind it and here it is.
We’ve written about arbitration a few times and made reference to this alternate dispute resolution process in several blog postings over the years. [For example, click: 
The augurs of ancient Rome prognosticated by inspecting the entrails of birds. Similarly, courts divine meaning by interpreting the detritus of our documents. When we don’t leave a clear message behind, those who follow get to tell us what the words we used meant. Sometimes they are right; sometimes not.
Yes, many readers may have heard whispers (or stage whispers) about the demise of LIBOR. Well, it goes on life support on December 31, 2021 and that might also be the date of its death. That’s when the banks that provide its underlying data will no longer be obligated to do so. Who cares? Those who set borrowing interest rates certainly do. Those who have loan documents based on some spread over a LIBOR rate where those documents didn’t consider a back-up rate if LIBOR ever went away care even more. 
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