Ninth law of worker entropy
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Negotiation Anatomy™
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Once known as the anal paradox Otto Büchstein’s theory of negotiation has since become recognised as the JC’s ninth law of worker entropy — a numerical challenge since it well predates the first eight, and indeed forms the basis for one or two of them. The JC’s ninth law of worker entropy: As the number of people involved in negotiating a contract goes up, its brevity, comprehensibility and utility goes down. The longer a negotiation continues, the more compendious, and tedious, will be its“fruits” — the verbiage, in the vernacular — even as its meaningful commercial content stay constants (or, more likely, declines to vanishing point).
The ninth law of worker entropy posits that ,as the number of people involved in negotiating a contract goes up, the contract’s brevity, comprehensibility and utility goes down. Therefore longer a negotiation continues, the more compendious and tedious will the fruit of that negotiation — the verbiage, in the vernacular— become, even though its meaningful content will stay constant or, more likely, decline.
Briefly stated, 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 try 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.
Hiring a dredger is expensive, and since the operating assumption of all lawyers is that no-one ever got sued for writing an unintelligible agreement[1], you leave it (perhaps tossing in a disclaimer for good measure) until one day your contract nears the event horizon of intelligibility, beyond which it risks collapsing in on itself, taking you with it, and precipitating the boredom heat death of the universe.
It almost happened in 2008, so don’t joke about it.
See also
Plain English Anatomy™ Noun | Verb | Adjective | Adverb | Preposition | Conjunction | Latin | Germany | Flannel | Legal triplicate | Nominalisation | Murder your darlings