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| [[File:Club.png|450px|frameless|center|Why did it take the legal community two thousand years to come up with this idea?]] | | [[File:Club.png|450px|frameless|center|Why did it take the legal community two thousand years to come up with this idea?]] |
| }}[[Legal eagle]]s ''love'' the idea that the standard, tedious terms that make up the lion’s share of commercial legal discourse are ''special''. | | }}Now, no legal form has more boilerplate than an [[NDA]]. To read one is to behold pure, abstracted, essence of boilerplate. ''[[Boilerplate]] is all there is''. Yet generations of legal eagles have dug themselves into slit trenches to argue the toss over this quotidian contract. It has been some kind of insane compulsion: not one of them ''enjoyed'' it; not one of them saw any point in it; they found themselves compelled to do it; drawn to it like moths to a lamp. |
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| Then again, we all — not just lawyers — like to believe our own domain is sacred: that we are privy to something critical; dangerous; ''delicate'' — arcane learning that, should it fall into unskilled hands, may wreak great ill upon the bystanding world.
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| ''Make way: I’m a doctor''.
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| But our dark secret: much of what we do, to get to those subliminal moments of rarefied artistry, we do on autopilot. To win Le Mans, first keep the engine tuned, the tank filled and the tyres pumped up. ''Then'' drive like Stirling Moss.
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| [[boilerplate|Boilerplate]] is the spark-plugs and fan belts of legal machine: workaday engineering that makes stuff go. What we want from it is ''reliability''. It will not ''win'' us the race; it can stop us ''losing'' it, by working, dependably, without breaking down.
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| “Working” means being easily installed — without argument — and commonly understood; at the limit, being able to withstand scrutiny before the [[Queen’s Bench Division]].
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| Curiously, that dependability is not intrinsic to the boilerplate itself: it is a function of ''what the community thinks it means''. There is, therefore, a strength in consensus: if everyone uses it, it is more effective, by itself, regardless of the cleverness of its engineering. Law is a sociological phenomenon, first and foremost.
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| We should regard boilerplate as a public resource. We should not extract rent from it. We should not regard it as special. Lawyers don’t help anyone, or nourish their own souls, by acing boilerplate. So, folks, let it go. ''Set your boilerplate free''.
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| {{maxim|The quotidian is a utility, not an asset}}.
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| Now, no legal form has more boilerplate than an [[NDA]]. To read one is to behold pure, abstracted, essence of boilerplate. ''[[Boilerplate]] is all there is''. Yet generations of legal eagles have dug themselves into slit trenches to argue the toss over this quotidian contract. It has been some kind of insane compulsion: not one of them ''enjoyed'' it; not one of them saw any point in it; they found themselves compelled to do it; drawn to it like moths to a lamp. | |
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| “I must negotiate this NDA, because this is what I do. [[It is in my nature]].” | | “I must negotiate this NDA, because this is what I do. [[It is in my nature]].” |