quote:It began as an arcane legal dispute between two Canadian companies, but a fight between Rogers Communications Inc. and Aliant Inc. over the placement of a comma in a multimillion-dollar contract has ignited an international debate over the importance of language.
After a long period of deliberation, Canada's telecom regulator is expected to rule on the case in the next few months. When it does, an array of business experts, law schools and language specialists from around the world will be watching the outcome closely.
The comma quarrel — which threatens to cost Rogers at least $1-million because of a simple grammatical issue in the contract — has been called an English teacher's delight, reinforcing the value of basic punctuation and grammar in the business and legal worlds.
It just goes to show that you that grammar is actually important Posts: 1158 | Registered: Feb 2004
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When we were filling out interrogatories from an attorney, they had a little blurb at the end that said something like: "In all cases in this document, YOU refers to John H. Smith" the name was of course, supposed to be my husband's, since he was the one answering the questions. But it wasn't his name, they had forgotten to change it from the last group of interrogatories they did. Simple word-processing error.
We called our attorney, and he said just fill it out any way, we knew what they meant. Hubby and I said no, we wouldn't answer it until they sent us a corrected copy. Glad we stuck to our guns. This stuff DOES matter.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Aliant is right--the placement of that comma in the contract does give them the right to pull out--but they are still sleazeballs for using that as an out if, at the time of signing, both parties understood the contract to mean that the first five year period was ironclad. IMHO.
Posts: 3149 | Registered: Jul 2005
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They should have worded it more clearly if they didn't want the contract broken. I can think of several ways that they could have more clearly gotten the intent of the sentence across, comma or no comma.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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But if you read the article, the comma isn't all that is at issue - apparently there is wording in the French version of the contract that skews the meaning as well....so then the argument becomes when there are two versions of a contract and one language implies one thing and another language implies another...which one is legally valid?
very interesting case, all around.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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