Harris is a fascinating take on two important legal issues for closely-held business owners. The “Doctrine of Definiteness” and “Agreements to Agree” In the original Harris decision, the lower court ruled that the presence of “significant handwritten modifications and marginalia” in the operating agreement, “including portions of which are illegible,” as well as a sentence in the operating agreement that it “shall be retyped and redrawn and prepared in a proper and final fashion,” raised “issues of fact as to whether a formalized agreement . . . exists and whether the operating agreement is enforceable.” As alluded to in our prior article, there is a fulsome body of New York case law addressing the concept of so-called “preliminary agreements” and “agreements to agree.” In these cases, one side argues that the parties did not intend the agreement to be enforceable unless every term was finalized and reduced to a signed writing, the other side arguing that the agreement should be enforced although some terms may have been left for future agreement or the document not signed.