Corporate & Securities Law

?Consecutive Months?

By Ken Adams

I’m looking at a contract that contains the following provision:

During the term of this agreement and the following 24 consecutive months, the Consultant shall not …

In this context, the word consecutive is redundant, as it is in any period of six consecutive months. (You’d be better off saying any six-month period.) And the same applies with respect to use of consecutive with other units of time.

Nevertheless, the SEC’s EDGAR system is full of contracts that include consecutive months. Is this a big deal? No, but if you include enough individual instances of redundancy, pretty soon the reader will be wishing for a machete. The only way to tackle redundancy is one instance at a time, and there’s no reason to spare this use of consecutive.

Full post as published by AdamsDrafting on September 28, 2008 (boomark / email).