Template:M intro design no-one reads this

JC, being given to making up social science on the hoof, is working on a theory that when you buy the services of a commercial law firm — and specifically when you buy it to make contracts for you — you are buying not the words, or even the underlying legal content, but the peace of mind that everything will be okay.

You are not meant to understand the actual words they send you, but just take general comfort that there are a lot of them, they seem quite sober, they are strung together in carefully constructed, if forbiddingly unbroken, slabs, and the battalions of advisors who are engaged to pick it over them, on either side will by the end of that process understand it all, that their skirmishing and sniping must do something — it must advance one or other side, and since these people are part of an educated elite, the wisdom of this crowd will operate to ensure that, by the end of the process, everything will have been thought about and all will generally be okay.

What if this assumption was — *wrong*?

To be clear this is not merely “I wonder if people buy Big Law to cover their 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 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.

These people are meant to be wizards of language, after all. They should deliver the most beautiful, clear, elegant product.

That they don’t is a kind of final triumph of form over substance.