draft minutes of last part of today's conference call

[Jason Harrop <jharrop@speedlegal.com>]

Hi

I was asked to take notes after Dr Leff excused himself from the 
meeting. These follow (comments/amendments welcome) ...

cheers,

Jason

-- 

Jason Harrop
CTO, SPEEDLEGAL
jharrop@speedlegal.com

SmartPrecedent(R) software
The most intelligent way to create documents
www.speedlegal.com


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Jason walked the participants through the template for an information 
item, as found in the latest draft of the Enterprise Contract Scenario, 
posted earlier this week.

It was agreed [ed - subject to suggestions made later being 
incorporated] that the template for capturing an information item will 
be used in each scenario.

Sergio and Barry intend to work on the information items required in the 
Enterprise Contract Management scenario.

Zoran, Rolly, Jim Keane and Dan are going to work on dispute resolution. 
  [ed - some of what follows may have been from earlier in the call] 
This will be done in such a way that it can be provided to the ODR TC. 
  It will be applicable to construction contracts, software licence 
agreements, and other types of contracts. This work may constitute a new 
Scenario, or it may be a contribution to the existing Dispute Resolution 
  scenario.  Dan will lead this work; Rolly (or was it Jim?) will 
provide sample clauses from construction contracts.

Dr Leff, John Messing and Dan will work on the Click-Through Scenario. 
Dr Leff is to lead this work.

In order to understand some of the issues which are likely to arise in 
filling out the template for any given information item, we looked at 
the "Contract Term" item as an example.

- we changed its name to "Contract Period or Duration", in part to avoid 
confusion between Contract Term, and a term of a contract.  Some debate 
as to which of "period" and "duration" is preferable.

- Sergio noted that the concept of commencement and duration is also 
relevant at the level of an individual term (ie clause) of a contract, 
since obligations might commence and cease at different times.

- we changed this item to "Optional", given that a contract may be 
silent as to duration (in which case the law will imply a reasonable 
time) (Rolly)

- where the contract is silent as to duration, this information item 
could have a value of "open" or "unspecified", since it is useful to be 
able to search for such contracts.

- "management of a contract" as a reason for capturing this item, was 
seen as perhaps to broad a rationale to be useful.  More detail was 
suggested, one example being the time based events commencement and 
expiration can triggger.

Discussion flowed over to the "Contract Event" information item.  Rolly 
noted that the significance of a Contract Event is that when one occurs, 
there is a "state change" which affects the parties.

Jim Keane [ed - or John Messing?] noted that there are different 
concepts of type, including a fixed point in time (a date), and an 
interval/duration. W3C XML Schema has a data type for representing 
duration.

It was agreed that two extra fields would be added to the template for 
an information item:

1. "See Also", which is hyperlinks to information items related to this one.

2. "Example Clauses/Articles", which is a place to put the text (or a 
hyperlink to the text) of clauses which contain the information, along 
with any commentary or notes the author wishes to add.

Jason to post a revised version of the Enterprise Contract Management 
Scenario containing these extra fields.

It was agreed that HTML should be the format we continue to use for the 
scenarios as we add information items to them.

[ed - we didn't have time to talk more specifically about the time line 
for completion of this work, except to say ..] The agenda for the next 
teleconference will include discussion of information items authored 
over the next fortnight.  On the Structural Markup front, the agneda 
will include choosing between recursive and hierarchical clause models.

The possible face to face meeting times/places contained in the agenda 
were discussed very briefly and inconclusively.  The possibility of ABA 
in San Francisco, in August, was also suggested.  The importance of 
organising a room soon was noted, if ABA is to be our choice.

Next 2 teleconferences as per minutes of 12 March teleconference, namely:

April 9th 16:00 Eastern, 21:00 GMT
April 23rd 16:00 Eastern, 21:00 GMT

Meeting closed.