Template:For clarity

Now as you know readers, we like to argue the toss about every little thing, with every little person, and every so often the JC finds himself getting in an argument with himself. This is one such occasion. For, however, odious this expression is; however mealy-mouthed; however derogative of an attorney’s basic professional calling, “for the avoidance of doubt” does have a use, and a deliciously subversive one at that.

It is a dead man’s code: a trail of breadcrumbs; a final message to the hereafter from a Tommy on the front in the perishing hope that, years later, someone might come across it, and his work will not have been in vain.

This is Private Eagle’s last, mud-stained letter to his sweetheart back home, saying “don’t worry, my love, everything will be all right” the night before he was sent over the top.

How so? Well, cast your mind forward five years. The contractual skirmish in which Private Eagle’s parting shot was fired is but a memory, as is Private Eagle. The contracts bearing it witness, once executed, were faxed, scanned, crushed, buried in peat, smudged, mislaid, sent by mistake to Colchester and eventually routed to their final resting place in an electronic document repository a server somewhere in Gdansk. They were sent there in the hope they would not be needed again except in case of catastrophe.

But lately, a catastrophe has occurred. The client is in trouble. The credit team are running around with their hair on fire. Suddenly, everyone in the chain of command up to and including the chief risk officer is feverishly interested. They want to know, in forensic detail, with utter certainty and now, what the documents mean.

The file is retrieved, packaged up and sent to some poor legal eagle who must do that analysis, faultlessly and at the double and categorically advise upper management that the risk team has the necessary rights to plunge their detonator. Young eaglet gets out the agreement template, sets it beside the executed document and does her best to compare this smudged, pixelated horror-show against what it it was meant to say, and would have said, had it been a perfect world. Eheu: it is not a perfect world. It is one inhabited by pettifogging buyside counsel. There are, accordingly, dozens of textual additions and excisions.

Now parsing a mutilated legal text on a good day is a fraught business: that is why lawyers get paid so much. But it is orders of magnitude worse in a crisis. Things that look straightforward in daylight rear up like hellish stallions in the black night of client distress. Words thrown carelessly into a draft take on a ghoulish aspect.

Of course, if these carelessly tossed-about words were simply a function of someone trying to show they they were paying attention, reading the document or just making some input, it might be different. But it is a curious fact of legal practice that the more harmless an addition is, the more terrifying it will seem on the eve of war. Its very frivolity will set alarm blaring precisely because it seems so unnecessary.

Why on Earth would anyone go to the bother of adding “... under this agreement or any other agreement, where applicable, as the case may be,” if it didn’t mean something?

It is axiomatic that words deliberately inserted have work to do: if they are not obviously beneficent, we must assume them to be nefarious. What a legal eagle doesn’t know for certain she must deny. It is in her nature.

“For the avoidance of doubt” is a neat trick to dispel just this uncertainty before one can be gripped by it. It says, “to whom it may concern: you may safely ignore what follows, because it goes without saying. It is only there because some pillock on the other side wouldn’t let it go, and our salesperson was about to go into orbit if we did not sign the docs. I did not die in a ditch. We closed the deal.”

This is an honourable use of a dishonourable expression. While passing subtle judgment on your opponent’s pedantry and steers your successors home: it solves the perennial problem of delivering certainty and accommodating your customer’s pedantry at the same time. It is just a pity it is such a tiresome phrase. But other phrases might do as well: “to be clear” — if you are comfortable with an informal register — “for clarity” if not.