Lawyers Writing

Ledocs:

...Let's take a class of people I do know something about -- lawyers. Your idea that lawyers write good standard English is, I am afraid, quite incorrect. Sure, there are some lawyers who have a very good command of English, but I don't have the impression that it's even the majority of lawyers. And the idea that one can count on a contract that avoids grammatical ambiguity by relying on the American professional class is absurd. This statement of yours makes me think that (i) either you have virtually no experience here, or, perhaps more likely (ii) your own standards as to what constitutes command of English grammar are not particularly high. I spent close to twenty years reading real estate contracts..

Me:

I’d think, though I don’t empirically know, that amongst professionals, lawyers have a comparatively good command of English. That command is after all a crucial tool of their trade.

I don’t think the idea that we can, and do, count on professionals, namely lawyers, to avoid ambiguity in contracts is absurd. In fact, rather than being absurd, the idea is a truism, and is self evidently true. That’s so for a number of reasons that you don’t sufficiently separate.

One reason for that self evident truth—one not so much concerned with writerliness—is precedent, the legally established meaning of contract language over time. Generally, lawyers by education and experience will be competent in those received meanings and the untrained will not be.

Another reason, more concerned with writerliness but not essentially concerned with it, is the contract writing lawyer’s necessary and self conscious concern with clarity and precision. The burden of the drafter is to try to ensure those qualities. So he will want to ask himself: does this formulation address the problem; is it clear; can it made be made clearer; are there logical holes in it; and so on. As someone above suggested, the need to be clear and precise may be in tension with elegant writing, but elegance in these matters is secondary.

Finally, though without exhausting the subject, you are making the mistake in arguing for the idea's absurdity, to use the cliché, of making the prefect the enemy of the good. That language is plastic and hence malleable and unruly in its meanings does not obviate the truism that consumers in fact do rely on lawyers for clarity and precision in the drafting of contracts, just the way the ill depend on doctors for diagnoses. Errors and imperfections do not counter argue lawyers’ comparative competence in their contract drafting, the comparison being with non lawyers drafting contracts, which, under their untrained hands, usually turn out to be unholy messes.