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 not buying the words, or even the underlying legal content that the words express, but a more general beatific peace of mind that you don’t need to understand the words or concepts, because someone else has done that for you, and they have told you that everything will be okay.
You are not even meant to understand the actual words they send you, and you may cause yourself trouble if you try to. It is better just to 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 have gathered on either side to pick over the banquet will, by the time they’re serving coffee and warming up the disco, understand it all, that their skirmishing and sniping must do something — it must advance one or other side’s agenda, the same way trenches and battle fronts are meant to thrust and counterthrust, and since the people who wrangle these textual monoliths are part of an educated elite, a kind of emergent wisdom settles upon the project whose net effect by the end of the process — even if you cannot fathom how or why — will be a comforting conviction that everything 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.