Corporate & Securities Law

The Second Edition of MSCD, One Year Out

By Ken Adams

December is when the American Bar Association tells its authors how their books did during the year that ended the previous September 30. So a couple of weeks ago I heard how the second edition of MSCD fared during the year starting just four months after its publication in July 2008.

Publishers and authors are notoriously cagey about sales information, so I can’t say much. But word from the Section of Business Law’s director of marketing is that MSCD remains a consistent bestseller, not only among Section of Business Law titles but among ABA books generally.

The only conceivable significance that might have for you is that the more copies of my book the ABA sells, the more likely it becomes that MSCD will acquire some heft as a means of settling questions as to contract usages. It’s been gratifying to have a couple of participants at recent seminars described to me how they were able to use the book for exactly that purpose.

I’ve seen close to home how the book has percolated throughout the legal profession. My wife Joanne is community relations manager for the New York Racing Association, and a couple of years ago she was in the office of a NYRA lawyer, chatting idly. She happened to mention that her husband is a desperately nerdy guy who writes about contract drafting, at which point the lawyer perked up and said, “He’s not that Ken Adams, is he?,” and pulled from his bookshelf a copy of the first edition of MSCD. If the book has made it to NYRA, I can only imagine the many other places it has come in handy.

Full post as published by AdamsDrafting on December 31, 2009 (boomark / email).