In the midst of crawling through 50+ page contracts we do get odd moments of humour.  Yesterday’s one was courtesy of Word’s find/replace feature.

Find/replace is a pretty useful tool for lawyers – e.g. if you’re doing a software licence agreement for Company X that is pretty similar to one you previously did for Company Y, you can just find/replace Company Y with Company X and hey presto – new contract!

However, if used incorrectly, you can get some pretty humorous results.

Yesterday’s example resulted from a contract that was originally prepared for a bank (referred to as the Bank throughout the agreement, which was then adapted use for an online insurance business (let’s call them Thingamajig).  A clever person decided to find/replace Bank with Thingamajig.  This resulted in gems such as:

• a Business Day excludes days when Thingamajigs are not open for business in the relevant country (should be days when banks aren’t open for business)
• Thingamajigruptcy (bankruptcy)
• the Thingamajiging Act (the Banking Act) and the Investment Thingamajig Special Administration Regulations (the Investment Bank Special Administration Regulations)
• carrying on Thingamajiging services
• carrying on investment Thingamajiging
• a double whammy – the commencement of the Thingamajig insolvency procedure under the Thingamajiging Act.

Clbuttic mistake! (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2667634/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-When-obscenity-filters-go-wrong.html for those who are unfamiliar).