Legal mark-up

Negotiation Anatomy™ Go Premium Walk-away | Escalation | Algorithm | Heuristic | subject matter expert | Operationalisation | Playbook | Smart contract | Dead horse | Knife fight | 7 wastes | Cruddy legal advice Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Negotiation Negotiation hacks Contract Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

A lawyer’s stock-in-trade, her currency, the oxygen that gives her daily routine meaning and her role physical substance. For what is she if not her comments?

Ego sum id quod dico - Si quaeris causidicum loqui, locutus est tibi

If you ask a lawyer for comments, she will give you some, whether your draft needed them or not. This is a founding crux of the anal paradox. For a mark-up proves you have read an agreement, considered its content, and justified your fee. It's in her nature. It is what she does.

No text is immune from adjustment, and if your only objective is to show you've read it, slipping in a harmless for the avoidance of doubt, or a without limitation or two, is the least professionally invasive way of achieving that.

No such ornamentation is calculated to improve the elegance of the text, of course. To do that you will need to disentangle some convoluted grammar. This will be seen as enemy action, especially if your edits are not directed at some legal content, however spurious.

Plain English Anatomy™ Noun | Verb | Adjective | Adverb | Preposition | Conjunction | Latin | Germany | Flannel | Legal triplicate | Nominalisation | Murder your darlings

Dramatis personae: CEO | CFO | Client | Employees: Divers · Excuse pre-loaders · Survivors · Contractors · The Muppet Show | Middle management: COO · Consultant · MBA | Controllers: Financial reporting | Risk | Credit | Operations | IT | Legal: GC · Inhouse counsel · Docs unit · Litigator · Tax lawyer · US attorney Lawyer | Front office: Trading | Structuring | Sales |