Vagueness and Ambiguity in Contracts (On-Demand)

As your first-year contracts professor surely told you, every solicitor’s nightmare is one in which their drafting earns them a permanent roasting from the bench. To prevent this unenviable result, many lawyers – young lawyers in particular– tend to rely on the safety of precedents, believing that un-litigated products from the past will surely pass further judicial scrutiny. Yet by their very nature, a precedent will be tuned and tweaked for specific situations by each lawyer using it, who will often leave vagueness and ambiguity in their wake for the next lawyer to wade through.

How do we reconcile the ease and relative safety of precedent usage with recent pushes from the bench, legal educators, and an increasing number of clients, towards clear and easy-to-understand language in contracts? This on-demand program points out common examples of the most prevalent pitfalls of using precedents – vagueness and ambiguity – and provides helpful techniques for spotting and correcting archaic and convoluted language, built into precedents over time, that confuses judges, lawyers, and clients alike.

This on-demand program was originally broadcasted as a webinar on May 27, 2020.

Presenter: Douglas H. Peterson, Douglas H. Peterson Professional Corporation