Template:Ninth law of worker entropy

The JC’s ninth law of worker entropy: as the number of people involved in negotiating a contract goes up, the contract’s brevity, comprehensibility and utility goes down. Therefore, the longer a negotiation continues, the more compendious and tedious will the “fruit” of that negotiation — the verbiage, in the vernacular — be, even as its meaningful commercial content will stay constant (or, more likely, decline).

Briefly stated, the paradox says this: however anal it may be to “add value” through qualifications, clarifications, for the avoidance of doubts, without limitations and other forensic celery, once these “correctives” have been made it is even more anal to remove them again, seeing as, Q.E.D., they make no difference to the legal or economic substance of the agreement either way. So, inevitably, one won’t die in a ditch about it, however appealing by comparison that experience might, to a prose stylist, seem, and the agreement will silt up to the point where its original intent is hard or impossible to make out.