Introducing Our Legal Glossary
Introducing our legal glossary
Amicus now includes an integrated legal glossary. Contracting is communication, and clarity depends on words. To reach clarity, you need the right terms and a shared grasp of what they mean. Competence in commercial work rests on a simple standard: understand what is being communicated, and make yourself understood.
Contracting is communicating
A contract records shared understanding. The promises, limits, and remedies live in language. Words carry the deal. When parties choose terms with care, they reduce ambiguity and friction. Fewer interpretive gaps mean fewer surprises, fewer loops with counsel, and fewer slowdowns at signature.
The glossary is a tool for that care. It anchors common terms in plain meaning so teams can check assumptions before they harden into drafts. It will not replace judgment. It will help you name what you intend with greater confidence.
Competence is comprehension
Competence is not jargon fluency. It is comprehension: the ability to understand what is being said, and to reply in kind. In negotiation, misalignment often hides in familiar words that different functions read differently. Sales may hear service level as a promise of uptime; engineering hears it as a measured target with exclusions. The glossary brings these readings into one place and plain speech.
Using it aligns teams and counterparties on meaning, which is where real progress happens. With a shared baseline, you can distinguish true disagreement from mere vocabulary. That lowers cognitive load, shortens meetings, and keeps attention on substance. It also makes handoffs cleaner: the words chosen in a term sheet can match the words that appear in the agreement.
Precision is a superpower
The right term, used at the right time, compresses meaning. It carries accumulated practice, context, and constraints in a small, high‑yield package. Like a picture worth a thousand words, precise language can replace paragraphs of hedging and explanation.
Precision does not mean ornament. It means choosing the word that fits the obligation, risk, or allocation you intend, and discarding the rest. The glossary helps by surfacing distinctions that matter—between assignment and delegation, conditions and covenants, termination and expiration—so you can draft to the point, not around it. That precision pays dividends later, when the contract is read by people far from the negotiation table.
Your barometer for clarity
Treat the glossary as a barometer for your own understanding. Browse a few entries before a drafting session, or scan a term that keeps recurring in your deals. If a definition sharpens your thinking, use that clarity to tighten the sentence rather than expand it. I learned this early on: my best teacher was Black’s Law Dictionary.
The integration puts definitions at hand during drafting and negotiation, which speeds alignment and reduces avoidable disputes. It helps teams converge on the same meaning faster, and it makes the intent of each clause more legible to future readers. That is the aim: fewer words, better choices, stronger agreements.