Legal, Not Legalese
We’ve been pushing a lot of docs through Compliance(!) lately, and our aspiration with all of them is straightforward: make them legal, but don’t make them sound like they were written by Legal. It turns out that’s more difficult than it sounds.
I was taught that good writing uses short sentences (though I know I sometimes violate that rule), active voice, and clear vocabulary. Because we operate in a fairly heavily regulated industry, Legal is not always able to share that view. Redlines come back with qualifiers and footnotes, plus belt-and-suspenders carve-outs that once saved someone in Delaware. It also seems like no one can say they “do” anything anymore; instead, we “intend” or “aim to endeavor” while acknowledging that past performance is not indicative of future results – even though Newton’s First Law would suggest that it is. (Not a forward looking statement!) It’s because regulations accrete we end up with 1,000 words of boilerplate on page two of every investment deck that everyone that disclosure is meant to protect ignores.
Again, I don’t begrudge Legal for this. It’s the world we’ve created for ourselves. That leads to an interesting (and libertarian) question about why we have lawyers at all. If we trusted that we wouldn’t wrong one another, we wouldn’t need them. But legalese is what I need to fall back on after you’ve wronged me – even though I’d always prefer to work together under a plain-English shared understanding.
I’ve written before that maybe the point is constraints. But only when constraints beget concision. When constraints beget caveats, the loser is comprehension. And the best way to figure out if someone is full of it or not is to hear exactly what they have to say.
– Tim
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