Template:M intro design no-one reads this

JC, being given to making up social science on the hoof, is working on a theory that when you buy the services of a commercial law firm — and, specifically, when you buy it to make contracts for you — you are not buying the words, or even the underlying legal content that the words express, but a more general beatific peace of mind that comes from hiring clever people. You don’t need to understand the words or concepts, because someone else has done that for you, and they have by their simple presence intimated — but letʼs be clear, they definitely havenʼt told you — that everything will be okay.

This illusion generally lasts as long as no-one subsequently casts a critical, or even analytical, eye over the documents. The moment they do — no one reads legal agreements for the hell of it, so assume they are reading it because they are being paid to pick holes in it — the illusion of comforting certainty vanishes. Critical grammatical operators —words like “not” — will be missing where needed and present where not. Square brackets, blobs and placeholders will appear where you dearly wish for certainty. Critical terms will be subject to non-existent subclasses. Carelessly tossed-in boilerplate will ram-raid carefully crafted terms.

The ugly secret of professional practice is that the work product is mostly shoddy, because for the most part, it doesnʼt matter if it is not.

You are not even meant to understand the actual words they send you, and you may cause yourself trouble if you try to. It is better just to take general comfort that there are a lot of them, they seem quite sober, they are strung together in carefully constructed, if forbiddingly unbroken, slabs, and the battalions of advisors who have gathered the most partd on either side to pick over the banquet will, by the time they’re serving coffee and warming up the disco, understand it all, that their skirmishing and sniping must do something — it must advance one or other side’s agenda, the same way trenches and battle fronts are meant to thrust and counterthrust, and since the people who wrangle these textual monoliths are part of an educated elite, a kind of emergent wisdom settles upon the project whose net effect by the end of the process — even if you cannot fathom how or why — will be a comforting conviction that everything will generally be okay.

What if this assumption was — wrong?

To be clear this is not merely “I wonder if people buy Big Law to cover their backsides?” Of course, they do. Everyone knows that.

I was getting at the fact that the Big Law work product, when you do read it, is dismal. This is because *it is not designed to be read*.

It is designed to just occupy space. It is like that expanding polystyrene stuff they spray inside internal partition walls for soundproofing.

There is just no craft, no elegance, no design, no architectural panache, no basic economy. It is just this tortured, brutalised, monstrous torrent of dreck, from end to end.

These people are meant to be wizards of language, after all. They should deliver the most beautiful, clear, elegant product.

That they don’t is a kind of final triumph of form over substance.