Re: [legalxml-econtracts] Clause model options

[Jason Harrop <jharrop@speedlegal.com>]

It seems to me that there are two fundamental questions which are key to 
deciding between a simple paragraph model and a grammatical para model (XHTML 2 
draft or otherwise):

1. How seriously do we regard the list/sub-clause problem?

2. To what extent do we care if our clause model is only used for contracts, as 
opposed to other business documents?

IMHO, irrespective of the view you take of the list/sub-clause problem, 
something based around the XHTML 2 draft is the worst of the three possible 
models we have before us.

Of the other two, which one is best depends on your view of 1.  Either you 
preserve grammatical para at the expense of ease of authoring, or you don't.

> Based on experience, I believe that many people will want to re-use
> block/para objects. 

I have now examined the Hanover / Goldman Sachs lease in detail, looking for 
grammatical paragraphs one might wish to re-use (as distinct from the entire 
clause (item) containing them).

Although it contains several clauses which have multiple paragraphs in them, in 
each case, the paragraphs are co-dependent (as you'd expect), so that one is 
unlikely to wish to re-use them alone.

Peter, it would be helpful if you could point us to a contract containing 
grammatical paragraphs which one would wish to re-use (where it is not 
sufficient to re-use the item as a whole).

My claim is that the item is the natural thing to re-use in a contract.  The 
idea that you need to represent grammatical paragraphs in order to facilitate 
re-use needs to be justified by examples.

> 3.5 The document outline
> 
> Jason acknowledges this issue under "Titles on Items in the document
> outline" but dismisses it as "hardly a fatal flaw".
> I beg to differ. There are actually 2 problems to address:
> 
> (a) Users can create irregular hierarchies with mixed paragraphs and items;
> 
> (b) What is the boundary between items included in the contents listing and
> those not included?
> 
> I believe this is the most significant limitation with the proposed simple
> paragraph model. 

As is the case with most contracts, the Hanover lease has lots of lists in it, 
but none of the list items have headings. So the contents listing is simply all 
the headings down to level 2.

Peter, it would be helpful if you could point us to a contract on the web which 
has both a table of contents in it, and list items with headings.  Such a 
contract presumably would raise problem (b)?

Similarly, it would be useful to see a contract which exemplifies problem (a). 
- If they exist, why not use a model which can represent them?
- If they do not exist, its because people don't create them, in which case 
there is little to worry about.

cheers,

Jason