> Just as you wouldn't format long walls of text and single short phrases the same way in typography
Topic drift: I hammer on my students that contracts are much more readable if done in short, single-subject paragraphs without long wall-of-words passages.
I always thought that legal language looks like C code that heavily relies on macros after it has been through a preprocessor.
Don't lawyers have effective ways to include and reference things, create standard definitions and procedures without pasting the same stuff everywhere?
> Don't lawyers have effective ways to include and reference things, create standard definitions and procedures without pasting the same stuff everywhere?
In some fields, yes — but as a class, lawyers: (A) notoriously prefer reinventing the wheel, and (B) sometimes could be suspected of hoping that the MEGO Factor — Mine Eyes Glaze Over — will cause the other side's contract-draft reviewer to overlook something that the drafter buried in a long, wall-of-words provision. I see that happen pretty regularly.
(In the 1990s I initiated and headed up a project for the American Bar Association Section of IP Law to try to standardize the wording of various building-block clauses for software license agreements. [0] The chief IP counsel of a Fortune X company [X being a very-low number], whom I knew pretty well from the Section, said he was opposed to having any kind of standardized language because, he said (paraphrasing), "I want to be free to be an asshole.")
>Don't lawyers have effective ways to include and reference things, create standard definitions and procedures without pasting the same stuff everywhere?
That could actually turn out to be worse. Take a look at a lot of federal bills. They're written like:
'In 8 USC 552(b)(ii) strike the word "foo" and insert "bar baz"'
You then have to go cross reference everything for every line. It's a nightmare. If the bill was written in a computer readable diff format instead, that could be better.
You wouldn't believe the lack of efficiency in law firms (much of the cost of which is passed to clients). When I tried selling SAAS to law firms, there was a degree of resistance because efficiency threatens the charge by the unit model.
> Aren't some contracts designed to not be readable with long drawn out passages?
From the oleaginous Francis Urquhart in the wonderful original (British) version of House of Cards: "You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment." [0]
Topic drift: I hammer on my students that contracts are much more readable if done in short, single-subject paragraphs without long wall-of-words passages.