Jennifer Baumann

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Recently, I have heard many attorneys and experts in legal writing touting the importance of eliminating the use of the term “shall” in contracts.  Generally speaking, this may seem like the right approach given that “shall” may be interpreted to mean something that could be done or “shall” may be…
Continue Reading Contracts Deconstructed: What “Shall” We Do?

Deal fatigue is a real issue — and something you will immediately understand if your job includes negotiations on a single contract that last months or even years.   When I say deal fatigue, I mean the situation where people get so tired of a project that they start compromising on…
Continue Reading Negotiation Tactics Matter: Dealing with Deal Fatigue

Negotiations related to gross negligence and willful misconduct seem to be trending this past fall.  So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to revisit what these phrases actually mean in the context of commercial contracting.   In many agreements, gross negligence and willful misconduct are “carve-outs” in the limitation on liability…
Continue Reading Contracts Deconstructed: Gross Negligence and Willful Misconduct

Our thoughts and prayers go out to those impacted by Hurricane Sandy and the Nor’easter.  While Mother Nature has been relentless against the east coast of the United States over the past several weeks, us IT attorneys cannot help but think about the significance of those force majeure clauses and…
Continue Reading Force Majeure: The Weather Doesn’t Care about Your IT Strategy

If we cast our collective minds back to the days “pre-Crunch”, a marked feature of many sourcing strategies adopted by larger entities was a move to embrace multi sourcing (i.e whereby a service or set of services which could conceivably have been awarded to a single supplier was instead broken…
Continue Reading SWING OF THE PENDULUM – SOLE TO MULTI AND BACK AGAIN by Kit Burden

From October 26-28, 2012, DLA Piper’s Intellectual Property & Technology group gathered for a retreat to Schaumburg, Illinois to discuss our various practices, current trends in the industry and develop additional ways to collaborate both nationally and internationally.

The participants from the Tech, Sourcing & Commercial group included attorneys from…
Continue Reading DLA Piper’s Intellectual Property & Technology Group Retreat

The use of “if” vs. “to the extent” is something we often consider closely in commercial contracting.  “If” creates a contingency under which a clause will either be triggered or not be triggered by a certain event.  “To the extent” may apply to the degree the event is applicable at…
Continue Reading Commercial Corner: “If” vs. “To the extent”

I was reading a post from a prominent social media “expert” providing advice for lawyers using social media.  In the post, among other advice, the expert recommended that lawyers look through twitter posts for people with problems and then offer to solve their problems by contacting the individuals via twitter. …
Continue Reading Social Media and Legal Professional Ethics