Lawyer's Documents

Caveate - This is not about all the practising lawyers in the filed today.  But most of the specimens we go to for day-to-day transactions are probably like this.

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I am sure most of us have had the misfortune of dealing with a lawyer for a sale deed or power of attorney or rental agreement and the like.  The ubiquous lawyer you come across for such purposes is someone who, at best, has a legal degree (hopefully) and has indeed passed legally (iffy).  They carry a double whammy for us -- pathetic language skills and an absolute inability to structure a straightforward sentence.  To begin with, their idea of a legal document is it should be smothered in legalese and should have bombastic language coming out of its pores.  As you can see, this is a deadly concoction and the result is a sale deed in which you invariably can decipher very little except identifying your name and address, if at all.  With our moderately better English, if we dare to suggest some changes in the structure or the language of the document, God help us.  The lawyer takes terrific umbrage and bristles for the rest of the transaction time with us.  And to be fair, it is not even his `own' document to begin with, but some shoddy cut-and-paste job, generously gifted for use by another lawyer-friend, who has similar or lesser credentials to boast of, if that is possible.

Typically such lawyers have one of two reactions when we attempt to infuse some decency to the laguage which is masquerading as English in their documents.  Either they bristle at our insolence in suggesting language changes to what they perceive as an outstanding piece of literary exposition or they shrug their shoulders with utmost indifference. They are wondering `why this idiot is paying me for doing the job and then wants to it himself'! The latter section of the tribe is easier to deal with.  We just write the document in better English and hope that the guy ensures that legally it is adequate, which is the bare minimum we can expect.  The former type is the real blistering problem.  Such guys have a preposterously inflated opinion of their document and, of course, themselves and would not even want us to tamper with a few `whereases' and `hereinbefore mentioneds' in that.  All we can do is some essential editing to satisfy our linguistic integrity and ask him to update the document.  The lawyer's pride and possessiveness about his master-piece will come glowing through when you discover in the next draft that three quarters of the changes we made are back in all glory, mocking at you and screaming out the lawyer's aggressive refusal to accept anyone as more proficient with English language.  

Most such lawyers think that the longer a sentence and more fully loaded it is with multiple synonyms and multi-syllable bombast (not that they recognize what they are), it is that much more convincing to the client.  Many sentences begin well, but are made to meander and stretch so interminably that one loses track of what the beginning was, when the end comes after some excruciating grind.  Once, I remember chopping down one sentence in a legal document to seven or eight individual sentences, which metamorphosis definitely helped in understanding the intent better.  More often than not, such gems of literary eloquence do not add any value to the document, except increasing its bulk.  And there lies the crux.  I realised, from personal experience, that such lawyers are very wary of letting us edit any of their crap out; because then the final outcome has only one quarter of the number of pages they began with, without losing any substance.  According to one somewhat honest lawyer  -- an oxymoron? --  many clients complain he has not done his job well if he skimps on verbiage, because their own legal perspective can only measure his work by volume and not by the quality of content.  To provide satisfaction to such clients, many lawyers insist on heaping up all the meaningless verbosity they can muster from assorted sources, including previously manufactured similar documents.  

Recently I had to do a real estate transaction and a broker was also involved.  This broker was familiar with my need/desire for crisp and precise documentation. He very earnestly told me that I dont have to worry about legal documentation because he has someone who is competent enough to do the job.  When the first draft arrived, I was appalled by the overall quality, since the language was terrible and many statements, long-winded and meaningless.  Redundancy was the hallmark of the entire piece and I shuddered at the shoddy nature of work.  When I rebuked the broker for such a document, he was shocked and blurted out that this was the best of the ten odd lawyers he had worked with in recent years.  After I briefly explained to him what the problems were, he realised his best was even beyond being the worst.  One vignette stood out and I showed the broker that the document, supposed to be a sale deed, had some seven pages of stuff which pertained entirely to a rental agreement, neatly tucked into the middle pages.  There were some twenty paras of how the buyer should conduct himself while living in the apartment and there was an indemnity clause to boot, for the seller's comfort, to cover breach of such rules of conduct by the buyer! Instead of being abashed at being an accomplice to such a document, the brazen broker sheepishly told me to help edit the whole thing completely, so that he can keep that as a master document for the future.  That was what I did free of cost for the broker.  The result, the document was downsized from twenty four pages to thirteen without compromising its legal sense, which responsibility I left to the lawyer.

As bankers, some of us have always wondered why Reserve Bank of India's circulars, containing directions to the banks as well as rules of banking, still rely so heavily on antiquated language from the colonial era. This not only makes reading of the circulars difficult, but requires some internal simplification and re-writing in the banks to enable lower level personnel to grasp the requirements well. In the process, there have been instances of silly errors creeping into the simplified instructions, causing grief to the banks later.  RBI and the lawyers are guilty of the same crime -- long-winded sentences which invariably have a good portion of redundant and/or heavy-duty verbiage.  The core difference is that while RBI's method is establishment-driven and probably requires an institutional shift whereas independent lawyers do not have the same problem, yet persist with antedeluvian mode of expression.

Over the years, I have wondered if younger lawyers coming into the profession would necessarily bring a wind of change and make the documentation easier to peruse and comprehend.  But unfortunately, that does not seem to have happened much.  Probably because of the copy-paste culture which is very prevalent in legal documentation. It will be interesting to find out how many young lawyers have drafted a proper legal document ab initio.  Your guess is as good as mine, but not many probably and not much of it, anyway.  Long live the serpentine sentences and bombastic expressions in legal documentation - posterity will also enjoy the fun!!  One young lawyer I recently met boasted of some fresh and modern methods of producing legal documentation, which impressed me....until I found out that the primary change he has adopted is in the matter of billing the client by the number of visits he made and the time he spent on the documentation!! Little else he had changed.