Corporate & Securities Law

Using Parentheses in Contracts

By Ken Adams

A couple of months ago, reader Kent asked me what I thought about using parentheses in contracts. Here, belatedly, is my answer:

In regular prose, parentheses (namely round brackets, like those enclosing these words) are used to offset text that constitutes an explanation or aside. The limited and stylized prose of contracts is generally not the place for explanations and asides, so drafters should have little call to use parentheses to serve that function. That said, parentheses represent one way to eliminate one kind of syntactic ambiguity (see MSCD 8.128) and are unobjectionable when used, for example, in enumerating blocks of text and to create a defined term after an integrated definition.

Full post as published by AdamsDrafting on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).