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 The ugly secret of professional practice is that much work product is like that because, for the most part, ''it doesnʼt matter if it is not''.
-A vanishingly small percentage of contracts are ever litigated. This is ''not'' because they are good contracts: it is because their parties donʼt fall out. ''Almost all contracts expire untested.''
+A vanishingly small percentage of contracts are ever litigated. This is ''not'' because they are “good contracts” but because they describe good relationships: their parties donʼt fall out. ''Almost all contracts expire untested.''{{maxim|If you have to read the contract, you have already lost}}. </ref>
-To its principals, the contract preparation process is a sombre mystery. You are not even ''meant'' to understand the actual words they send you, and you may cause yourself trouble if you try. It is better just to take generalised comfort that there are a ''lot'' of words, they seem legally sonorous, they are strung together in carefully constructed, if forbiddingly unbroken, slabs and the battalions of advisors who have gathered at the banquet on either side to pick them over will, by the time the busboys are serving coffee and warming up the disco, have {{strike|maximised their chargeables|made peace with the legal content}}.
+To its principals, the contract preparation process is a sombre mystery. They are not ''meant'' to understand the actual words, and may cause themselves trouble if they try. It is better just to take generalised comfort that there are a ''lot'' of words, they seem legally sonorous, they are strung together in carefully constructed, if forbiddingly unbroken, slabs and the battalions of advisors who have gathered at the banquet on either side to pick them over will, by the time the busboys are serving coffee and warming up the disco, have {{strike|maximised their chargeables|made peace with the legal content}}.
-All that skirmishing and sniping must, after all, ''do'' something — ''mustnʼt it''? It must advance what the respective advisors take to be their clientsʼ interests, however imperfectly they understand them?
+All that skirmishing and sniping must, after all, ''do'' something — ''mustnʼt it''? It must advance what the respective advisors take to be their clientsʼ best ainterests, however imperfectly they understand them?
-In the same way trenches and battle fronts thrust and counterthrust, the lines move back and forth. Since the people who wrangle these textual monoliths are part of an educated elite, a kind of emergent wisdom settles upon the project. Its net effect — even if you cannot fathom how or why — will be a comforting conviction that everything will generally be ''okay''.
+In the same way that trenches and battle fronts thrust and counterthrust, the red lines in a negotiation move back and forth. Since the people who wrangle these textual monoliths are part of an educated elite, a kind of emergent wisdom settles upon the project. Its net effect — even if we cannot fathom how or why — will be a comforting conviction that everything will generally be ''okay''.
 But what if this assumption was — ''wrong''?
-To be clear, the question is not merely “I wonder whether commercial principals — should I say “[[agency problem|agents]]” — hire law firms to cover their backsides?”
+To be clear, the question is not merely “do  commercial principals — should I say “[[agency problem|agents]]” — hire law firms to cover their own backsides?”
 Of ''course'' they do. Everyone knows that.
-I was getting at the fact that the Big Law work product, when you do read it, is dismal. This is because *it is not designed to be read*.
+It is more to say that the “attorney work product”, when you do read it, is dismal. ''It is not designed to be read''. ''No one reads a bond prospectus''.
-It is designed to just occupy space. It is like that expanding polystyrene stuff they spray inside internal partition walls for soundproofing.
+On this view, legal writing is designed to just occupy space. It is like that expanding polystyrene stuff they spray inside internal partition walls for soundproofing.
 There is just no craft, no elegance, no design, no architectural panache, no basic economy. It is just this tortured, brutalised, monstrous torrent of dreck, from end to end.