Compromising positions

The coffee’s cold, the mediator is snoring in the room next door and you’ve been negotiating for hours. At last, a compromise is reached. The pressure is on to draft a watertight agreement before “settlement remorse” sets in.
In these circumstances, there is only one thing worse than having to explain to your client that you are uncomfortable drafting an agreement on the spot, and that is confessing months later that the one you drew up is defective. This article therefore offers the anxious litigator a crash-course in settlement drafting and a guide to the traps lying in wait for the unwary.

The anatomy of a settlement

Most settlements can be reduced to six core components, along the following lines [these persons] [settle] [the claims] [arising from] [the facts] [by doing something]. The first section of this article follows this structure.

[these persons]

Identifying and naming the immediate parties to the settlement will be obvious and easy. This is however the moment to reflect on the wider