I’ve just returned from a visit to Finland that combined work and play. On the one hand, I had a public “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar to do. On the other hand, I went with my wife Joanne; we were staying with my brother Charles, who happens to be the U.S. ambassador to Finland; and longtime family friends were in attendance too.

Helsinki

My seminar took place last Friday. In Europe, each public seminar I do requires a host, and in this case it was Roschier, the leading Nordic law firm. My thanks to them—the whole setup was impeccable. Photos of seminars aren’t particularly edifying, but for the heck of it, here’s a photo of the seminar room during a break.

And the participants were a congenial bunch—during breaks I had a chance to chat with them about Finland and the contract-drafting life. It appears they found the seminar worthwhile. According to a later email from one participant, “Your seminar was so far the most useful and most entertaining one I’ve attended.”

My brother organized a private reception in the ambassador’s residence for after the seminar, so a group of participants joined me in walking back to the U.S. Embassy. To the right is a photo of a cadaverous-looking gent with one of the participants. A good time was had by all. For one thing, the residence is a grand place to have a party. It’s beautifully appointed, with extensive flame-birch paneling and moulding that was recently restored—who knows why it was painted over in the first place.

Lahti

Joanne and I were able to stay for the weekend, so we tagged along with my brother as he headed an hour north of Helsinki to the city of Lahti, to make an appearance at the Lahti X-Treme Car Show, an annual gathering of fans of U.S. vintage cars and hot rods that attracts some 10,000 fans.

Why would the U.S. ambassador appear at a car show? It so happens that a member of the embassy staff is a car buff, so the embassy had a stand featuring his vintage Ford. (Charles is at the wheel in the photo below.) And Charles was a featured guest at the show. He appeared on stage with the other luminaries, Richard Rawlings, co-host of the Discovery show Fast N’ Loud, and Gene Winfield, veteran customizer. Charles’s main responsibility was to pick a car as “The Ambassador’s Choice.” He selected a Stingray entered by Finnish vocational school that trains students in car restoration, with all costs paid by a branch of Finnish government. (There’s a reason why the Finnish education system is so highly regarded.)

Meanwhile, the rest of the embassy contingent wandered around the exhibit halls, ogled the cars, were treated to lunch (cloudberry salad, reindeer soup, and apple cake for me), and sampled Finnish beer. It was all slightly surreal: Joanne and I had hardly been exposed to Finland, yet here we were in the thick of Finnish car subculture. It’s something Finns take seriously, as was evident in the commitment demonstrated by those in attendance at the car show. The United States has every reason to consider itself fortunate that it has such friends.

Helsinki Again

We spent Sunday in walks around the city, as well as a brief run. We were favored with a spectacular fall day.

Charles gave Joanne and me a tour of the embassy. It’s an impressive new building, finished just a couple of years ago. The embassy is quite a substantial operation. Here’s a photo of Joanne and me on a terrace of the embassy.

We ended the evening with pizza—my pizza. It was a challenge using random Finnish flour instead of my usual King Arthur’s flour, and an industrial convection oven instead of a regular oven with a baking stone. But no one went hungry.

Four days in Finland doesn’t qualify me to say anything about Finland, but I permit myself to observe that the Finns I met were unfailingly welcoming, thoughtful, and engaging. And Helsinki is a beautiful city. I hope I have the opportunity to visit again.

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My “Notes from the Road” posts aren’t intended as simple travelogue; that might be annoying. Instead, I try to tie each post to my contract-drafting-guy activities. It might be tough to pull that off when the destination was the Australian resort town of Noosa, but here goes.

After seminars in Sydney and Melbourne, this past weekend I headed to Noosa, because that’s where Rodney Huddleston lives.

Rodney is co-author of the linguistics bible The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and he was a longtime lecturer at the University of Queensland. He retired in 1997, but he keeps his hand in, which is how in 2012 I was introduced to Rodney by Geoff Pullum, another linguistics luminary.

Why fraternize with linguists? Here’s how I think of it: Linguists obviously do grammar—the title of Rodney’s book is enough to tell you that. But to keep me out of trouble, I’ve come up with my own working distinction between grammar and linguistics. “Grammar” is what judges and lawyers are quick to invoke in contract disputes. In doing so they tend to rely on their own instincts and limited research, so they routinely screw up. By instead thinking of it all as “linguistics,” I remind myself that things get complicated quickly and that if I aim to offer guidance in this area, I should consult experts.

Rodney ultimately helped me enormously with MSCD chapter 11 (Ambiguity of the Part Versus the Whole). That chapter addresses ambiguity associated with plural nouns and and, or, each, any, and all. It’s an intricate topic; without Rodney’s help I would have been sunk. As it is, to my mind that chapter is the most thorough analysis of the topic in any literature.

Since then, Rodney has responded to my occasional cries for help. Most recently, he helped me avoid some potholes as I was writing my article on sources of uncertain meaning in contracts (copy here).

Once someone helps me out enough, it seems appropriate that I try to get to know them in person, instead of only through email. This year I had a few days free after my Melbourne seminar, so off to Noosa I went. It was a memorable visit: Rodney and his wife, Vivienne, were extraordinarily hospitable, and Noosa and the surrounding countryside are scenic and distinctive.

It would be indiscreet of me to drone on at length, and it would be boring for you if I were to do so, but here are a few highlights:

Beach

Rodney and Vivienne live in a home perched above Sunshine Beach. It’s the most glorious beach I’ve had the pleasure to visit. The beachfront development is restrained. The sand is perfect. The water is a tropical blue-green. The water temperature was ideal. And it was far from crowded, particularly early in the morning. In addition to swimming and running on the beach, I enjoyed simply watching the waves from Rodney and Vivienne’s house, while also being on the lookout for the dolphins and humpback whales farther from shore. The photo the right shows the view from lunch one day.

Park

Rodney and Vivienne’s house is next to Noosa National Park. It’s a fragment of what was originally an extensive coastal ecosystem. It’s full of distinctive plants, and the setting is striking.

In my three days there, I was able to see much of the park. That’s largely because when it comes to walking, Rodney’s indefatigable; he’s done days-long hikes in different parts of the world, and he walks the park every day. No heroics were required in walking around Noosa Park, but we covered a lot of ground on paths such as that in the photo to the right. The park also has beaches, including Alexandria Bay, in the photo at the top of this post.

Countryside

My second day at Noosa, we drove around the beautiful countryside inland from Noosa, more specifically the Blackall Range. We stopped at Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, a remaining bit of rainforest, where we had lunch with Rodney’s daughter and son-in-law and their two boys. The forest featured a wealth of noteworthy trees, including the strangler fig to the right. And we saw the featured attraction, pademelons—a kind of small kangaroo.

That’s Rodney and me in the photo to the right, which was taken at the reserve. In the background are the Glass House Mountains, including Mount Beerwah at the right. The plan had originally been for us to climb Mount Beewah; I expect that would have involved plenty of huffing and puffing on my part.

***

It was a quick visit. And the road goes on forever, so I’m now in Lake Forest, California, with Toronto to follow. But I’m gratified that I now have a better sense of someone who has contributed meaningfully to my work. And perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to show Noosa to my wife and daughter.

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I’m just back from Kuwait, where I did a “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar under the auspices of the Kuwait Commercial Arbitration Center and the Commercial Law Development Program of the U.S. Department of Commerce. I thank the KCAC for their hospitality, and I thank the CLDP for being imaginative enough to think that exposing Kuwaitis to yours truly would further the CLDP’s mission. In particular, I thank James Filpi, my congenial CLDP minder.

The participants likely found the seminar challenging. I think it’s fair to say that Kuwaitis are still relatively new to drafting sophisticated commercial contracts. And they’re not native English speakers. On top of that, you have me telling them that traditional contract drafting is dysfunctional and offering them instead the MSCD view of things. In any event, I hope they found the seminar useful.

Unfortunately, I had little enough time to see Kuwait, other than from the back of taxis. I tagged along with Jim to various expatriate events, where I heard about recent developments in Kuwait. I got to ask some people whether clearer contracts is something Kuwait should care about.

In the past few years I’ve had occasion to visit Oman, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Dubai, and now Kuwait. I’m pleased that I already know I’ll be returning to the region twice more in the coming months.

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Last Sunday and Monday I gave back-to-back “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminars in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The seminars were held at the impressive offices of the Saudi Center for Commercial Arbitration and were arranged by the Commercial Law Development Program of the U.S. Department of Commerce. My thanks to the SCCA for their gracious hospitality. My thanks also to CLDP for making the seminars possible, and to my minders at CLDP, James Filpi and Lucas Graf, for making sure it all went off without a hitch.

Around 500 people (!) applied to attend the seminars; the SCCA selected 50. Both groups were engaging, and they appeared to find the seminar worthwhile. I enjoyed seeing how some participants quickly demonstrated a basic grasp of what I’m trying to do with “the categories of contract language”—my framework for the different kinds of meaning expressed in contract provisions and the verb structures used to express them. (The easiest way to get a sense of the categories of contract language is to look at the draft “quick reference” in this blog post; the final version will be in the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting.)

Why did I do the seminars? It wasn’t for money; the CLDP just covered my expenses. Instead, I did them for the same reasons I do any seminars in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. First, I’ll take any opportunity to spread the word in a country where what I do is less well known (although some participants at the Riyadh seminars have been reading my blog for years).

And second, I’ll happily do a seminar in a country that otherwise I likely would never have had the opportunity to visit. Most of my travel is of the airport-hotel-meeting-room sort, but engaging with seminar participants is by itself enjoyable and informative. And if I’m lucky, I’m also able to squeeze in a restaurant visit or two, and maybe even a run.

As it happens, in Riyadh, James, Lucas, and I were fortunate to have been able to spend an evening as guests of the Scientist’s Gift Program, a not-for-profit program that aims to introduce selected visitors to aspects of the culture of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

We were given a guided tour of Al Masmak fort in Riyadh, the site of an important episode in Saudi history—the storming of the fort in 1902 by King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. We strolled through a market, one result being that James, Lucas, and I were presented with local garb. (Clearly, I’m no Omar Sharif!) The evening ended with a delicious Saudi meal.

My thanks to our attentive and gracious guide, Abdulaziz Al-Shoumar. I expect that his goal was simply that we end the evening with a somewhat broader view of Saudi culture, as compared to whatever ideas we had casually picked up over the years. If that was the case, he can—speaking for myself—consider the evening a success.

(Go here for all my “Notes from the Road” posts.)

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In the past ten years I’ve done seminars in many countries. I haven’t counted them, and it would be juvenile to list them, although I’ve sporadically done “Notes from the Road” posts about my travels (here). I’ve also visited many cities in the United States and Canada that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. So what do I get out of my travels? What do I lose?

The basic ingredients of an international trip consist of my flying to a given destination, making my way to a hotel (usually one that’s part of a global chain), doing a seminar, grabbing a couple of meals—usually by myself—at local restaurants, working out at the hotel, and going for a run or a walk.

I just came back from Manila. That trip fit the pattern. Because I’ve sold my soul to Delta, I flew there and back via Detroit and Tokyo. I stayed at the Holiday Inn Hotel and Suites Makati, and that’s where I did the seminar. I had dinner one night at a Filipino restaurant, Mangan, in the adjoining mall. The next night I had suckling pig, a Filipino specialty, at Mesa, a five-minute walk away. (In the photo to the left is my one-sixth of a suckling pig, minus what I’d already eaten.) I would have gone for a run, but given the traffic and a lack of enticing running routes, I limited myself to working out at the hotel and walking the streets around the hotel.

What do I get out of such trips? I don’t mind the plane travel and hanging in hotels, but by now that side of things is routine. The restaurants range from mundane to memorable. The same goes for my excursions. (I particularly enjoyed running along the water in Geneva, Helsinki, Sydney, and Vancouver and a run along jungle trails in a Bangkok park.) But neither restraurants nor excursions could be said to make a trip. And whatever facts I glean about a given destination during the course of a trip, I could learn way more in an hour of reading.

It’s the seminars that matter. Whether I’m speaking to six people—that’s happened!—or 120, it’s my job to make sure those taking part feel that the day was well spent. That’s a matter of basic integrity, but it also helps spread the gospel of clear and modern contract drafting. The effect of a single seminar will likely be negligible, but do a few hundred and you start making a mark. At least that’s what I tell myself.

I have an advantage over many business travellers, in that doing seminars is fun—I get to put on show and share my unlikely passion. And let’s not forget that I get paid—giving seminars is part of my livelihood.

Beyond that, what makes a trip memorable is engaging with locals. (“Locals” might sound a little patronizing, but I can’t think of a better term.) I do a bit of that during seminars, over lunch, but sometimes I’m lucky enough to be able to do more than that. I recall in particular my first trip to Seoul, described in this 2013 post. And the time when I bumped into a seminar participant in a Kuala Lumpur mall, and she insisted that I join her and her friends for dinner. What I get out of such encounters is entirely intangible—something shared—but I find them valuable.

What price do I pay for doing these trips? This Fast Company article describes the physical and mental toll of business travel, but I’ve not yet been ground down. I feel bad about leaving my wife, Joanne, for extended periods—when she married me, she didn’t anticipate I’d morph into the globetrotting contract-drafting guy. And as a practical matter, it’s hard to be efficient about getting work done when you’re traveling. At some point I expect that as my other activities increase I’ll have to restrain myself from accepting whatever seminar gigs come along.

But for now, the benefits of my nomadic life clearly exceed the cost. Interested in my upcoming seminars in Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing? Go here for more information.

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Let me tell you about last week’s trip to Denmark—to Aarhus and Copenhagen.

Over time, I’ve ended up paying less attention to some elements of my trips. As long as my air travel is uneventful, it’s time to work or sleep, with the occasional bad movie thrown in. Similarly, on this trip I enjoyed the fast, clean, and efficient Danish trains, but I didn’t spend a lot of time gazing out the window, although the verdant scenery was a refreshing change from the blight too often on display in most train rides I take in the U.S.

The same goes for my accommodations. In Aarhus, my Airbnb hosts were very welcoming, but while there I mostly sat in my room, working and taking part in LegalSifter calls. And I spent little time in my Copenhagen hotel.

Food? When I was on my own, food on this trip somehow consisted of variations on a falafel-sandwich theme.

But if the incidentals have receded in importance, I never take for granted the reason for my travels. This time, it was two in-house seminars. As with all my seminars, it was a responsibility and a privilege to have people take a day out of their busy lives to hear what I have to say.

One seminar was for an intimate group of lawyers at Grundfos, located in Bjerringbro, a 45-minute car ride from Aarhus. (I would have liked to have had a few minutes to practice pronouncing Bjerringbro at least somewhat like a Dane.) I hadn’t heard of Grundfos before they contacted me, but the week before my trip, the contractor redoing our basement showed me the new utilities room, and I was astonished to see that it includes an array of Grundfos pumps (see the photo to the right). Well, I shouldn’t have been: Grundfos has an outsize share of the world market for water pumps, a ubiquitous but largely hidden piece of machinery. My thanks for Rasmus Dalgaard Laustsen of Grundfos for helping organize this seminar.

The other seminar was for Gorrissen Federspiel, one of Denmark’s leading law firms. The raked seating in their handsome auditorium (see the photo at the top) was filled with their lawyer and client representatives, junior and senior. During lunch with two Gorrissen partners, Ole Horsfeldt and Søren Stæhr, and my friend Martin Clausen, we discussed the inevitable question: how to get law firms off the copy-and-paste treadmill.

Of course, the Danes I spoke with in both groups were utterly fluent in English, unfailingly courteous, perceptive, tall, and too good-looking. And I hereby declare Denmark the clear leader in seminar food (in-house-seminar category).

Also important in my travels is saying hello to old friends. That I was in Copenhagen was thanks to Martin Clausen. He was also responsible for my two previous trips to Denmark. (Go here for my post about one of those trips.) After a distinguished in-house career at Maersk Line and MHI Vestas, Martin couldn’t resist exploring how he might help apply legaltech to the contracts process. Don’t be surprised if he appears on this blog sometime soon.

But there’s one incidental activity I remain committed to—running. It offers another way of acknowledging that I’m somewhere different. So in Aarhus I ran in Risskov Park, and in Copenhagen I ran around the Søerne, the three rectangular lakes curving around the western edge of the city center. The photo below is from the latter run.

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I’ve just returned from a whirlwind trip to Rome. Work I was there to do a “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar for an Italian company with global operations. A good time was had by all. By some freakish alchemy, my seminars manage to be more engaging than the subject might suggest. Heck, if I’ve found the […]

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My seminar trips aren’t like vacation. They’re not for sightseeing—if I’m not careful, a trip can consist of various forms of transportation, time in a hotel, time in a meeting room, various forms of transportation taking me home, and not a whole lot else. And usually I don’t linger—I’m not big on solo tourism, and […]

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Warning! This post is for seminar aficionados only. It contains minimal cultural insight and nothing on contract drafting. Instead, this post celebrates my 14 November 2019 “Drafting Clearer Contracts” seminar in Seoul. Out of the hundreds of seminars I’ve done over the past 14 years, it was the spiffiest. How so? For one thing, it […]

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In this post from late last year, I said I didn’t think I would ever travel as much as I did in 2019. But when I wrote it, I of course didn’t expect things to fall off a cliff they way they have. I’ve travelled only once this year, in March, for a seminar in […]

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