Simplify Corporate Contracts: Replace 'To the Extent That' with 'If' (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, this is Brett Zinkes. I am a corporate lawyer and I am always trying to get better at what I do. There's a gentleman I follow named Ken Adams. He is the, in my opinion, the go-to source for better, more modern contract drafting. And so reading his stuff has made me like particularly analyzing every word that I put into a contract. And this isn't one I've heard him talk about, although he may. This is one that I see over and over and over and it's on my radar. So I'm going to give you today's quick corporate drafting tip. And it is to pay particular attention to the words, to the extent that. So this shows up in a couple of cases, two main instances. One is where you would see something like party A shall be liable to party B to the extent that. And what you're really trying to say is to the degree that or in proportion to you're trying to say party A is going to be responsible to the degree that they're responsible. Okay. Uh, that's okay. I mean, it'd be easier to say in proportion to, right. But it is acceptable. It makes some sense where you want to get it out of your corporate drafting. Just get it out of there is, and you'll see it a lot, far more often is a sentence. We'll start to the extent that party A determines what they're really staying there in 15 letters is if, if party A determines to the extent that party A believes they have been misled. Um, how about if party A believes they have been misled, right? You can take 15 letters and get them the heck out of there. And the way you would not talk, you would not say to where your own friends to the extent that you'd like to go to dinner this evening, like that's just lawyer speak, right? How about just if you'd like to go to dinner. So that's a very quick corporate tip. You can make your drafting much more modern and much more simple. If you always pay attention to that in whenever it shows up, you can, you can use, if use, if good luck with your corporate drafting.