Choosing A Law Firm: Supersizing Often Fails
Would you hire a vendor that does not properly regard conflicts of interest? Fails to abide by basic business rules and laws? Loses you in the shuffle of other and larger clients? Violates its own internal procedures? Of course not. Yet business owners do this every day when engaging law firms. So please accept this […]
Liquidated Damages In Real Estate Agreements
Liquidated damages provisions must be given careful consideration when negotiating a real estate agreement. Liquidated damages provisions usually appear as “earnest money” or a “non-refundable deposit” to set forth the negotiated amount of money that a seller can retain if a buyer breaches a purchase and sale agreement. Buyers are generally entitled to a return […]
AI and the Future of Contracts
Contract negotiations and interpretations present unique challenges for AI. For millennia contract law has been all about contextual understanding, personal analyses, concern for the future, and preventing (or creating) ambiguities. These issues are why solely relying on AI to draft contracts is unwise. Unsurprisingly, AI-generated contracts lack the ability to adapt for changes in the […]
Intercreditor Agreements
Intercreditor agreements are key. This is particularly true for real estate investors.
Supply Chain and Pricing
“Supply chain issues” is the post-Covid version of saying “the check is the mail.” It is a perfect analogy. When a person blames the post office, that person is blindly blaming everyone from the clerk at the post office to the person who delivers your mail plus an untold number of people who have […]
General Thoughts on Remote Work
Rejecting all requests for remote work is the easiest legal solution. But it might leave a company with few or no employees. A less extreme concept would be limiting remote work to short periods not to exceed sixty or ninety days within a calendar year but this might not be feasible either in this employment […]
SaaS Agreements – Part 3
And now for the conclusion of SaaS agreements…. 8. Warranties. Software providers try to disclaim every possible warranty in their agreements. When they are willing to provide any warranty, it is likely because there are multiple redundancies in the software that enable to the software to function under most every circumstance. That being said, customers […]
SaaS Agreements Part 2
For those of you who missed part one, please click here. I am diving right in. 5. Customer Support. For software companies, there is a delicate balance to be struck the amount of customer support and the pricing for customer support. Smart software companies have already decided these issues well before customer outreach starts. Customers […]
IP Licenses Are IP Leases
An intellectual property license is a lease for use of Intellectual property. If attorneys and their clients understood this elemental principle, then licensing negotiations would often be less complicated, less fought over, and less expensive. Certain words are used in the same manner in both types of agreements, such as the words “term”, “termination”, and […]
When Good Non-Recourse Loans Go Bad
More than $5 trillion of commercial real estate-related debt is scheduled to mature by the end of 2024. Significant demand to refinance debt over the next fourteen months will occur regardless of economic conditions. But current and anticipated economic conditions for commercial real estate owners are not promising. Finding affordable refinancing opportunities will grow increasingly […]
