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Why are legal documents always so verbose?
Main Post:
Hey r/Ask_Lawyers :D
So, the question in the title arose when I was reading a licensing agreement and it took a page saying what is basically 'do not copy our product and do not resell it'. Maybe it is just me, but often in documents like these, there are incredibly long 'pauses' between actually meaningful information, making it hard to read, at least for somebody not proficient in the field.
Question is: why are the texts so verbose, yet incredibly hard to understand?
I've come up with these points, but maybe there's something else or these are wrong:
- Look, aka the fact that a big, serious paper certainly looks better than a one-page agreement. A paper written with usual language would look unprofessional
- Tradition, aka the fact that all papers before were written like this, why break the mold?
- Being vague, often times I notice that papers try to be super vague, probably to eliminate loopholes by saying 'well this is barely covered by that vague statement there, so you should've known'
And another question would be: is there anything preventing one from writing a functional agreement, probably as vague xd, but in layman's terms? Or will it somehow stop working, even if it has all the stamps and approvals? :D
(Sry for bad formatting, am on mobile)
Top Comment: When I'm drafting a contract (or any legal document, such as a divorce settlement), I tell my client that if they end up back in court fighting with the other party over what the document means, then in my opinion I've failed as your lawyer. I try to consider as many potential disagreements as possible, and for each, I include detailed enough language so that any potential opposing lawyer who looks at it will tell my client's opponent, "There's no point in fighting this in court because it's perfectly clear about what's supposed to happen in this situation." And unfortunately for non-lawyers, that usually means using a lot of words. I get that the verbosity is annoying to non-lawyers, but more often than not, I see parties in legal disputes waste more attorney's fees in cases of insufficient detail, as opposed to excessive wordiness. Sorry. ̄_(ツ)_/ ̄