Your goal is not to win litigation but avoid it

The design of organisations and products →Go uptown Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Design Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Anglo Saxon lawyers are trained from their first day that the common law flows in a golden stream from the decided case law; that the mystic runes of their craft are therefore the literary by-product of litigation. It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that they should be tempted to regard litigation as the highest expression of their art, a kind of Sinai from which stone tablets are delivered.

But a civil courtroom is a strange place, visited only by those who have demonstrably taken leave of their senses and their representatives who are happy enough to indulge their delusions at a suitable hourly rate. It is no better a place to distil the rules of decent human conduct than a motorway pile-up is to deducing the principles of defensive driving.

Yet, when they draw up contracts, legal eagles cannot help but think in terms of remedies.

See also

• Doctrine of precedent
• Writing for a judge
• Commercial imperative