Shameless plug here but my startup's mission is to solve this problem. It seems wrong to me that in this day and age you have to hire someone to be able to read a legal document or TOS: https://layman.ai/
Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
61–70 of 337 posts
Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the reason contracts aren't readable to laypeople is because laypeople aren't the intended audience. This doesn't make sense. The parties to the contract are presumably laypeople, and they have to understand it before they agree to it and sign it since one of the legal requirements for a valid contract is a meeting of the minds, meaning a common understanding between the parties of what each of them is agre…
While the parties are usually laypeople, the drafters and readers of significance are almost always lawyers. If you decide to try to bring a claim against your mortgage lender, will you have a lawyer read your mortgage agreement before you file suit? Surely.
Then what hope is there for a layperson to do anything of significance without first having a lawyer vet the EULA?
Such agreements are already absurdly long for some of the most trivial services or products. The answer cannot become "be a lawyer or rich enough to afford retaining one".
Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#63I think this "poor writing", as in hard to understand writing with long backreferences is due to the same reasons as why many academics are terrible at explaining things, as well as why source code is hard to read. I should know, others usually like pointing out how terrible I am at explaining things. And I think I know why. When I make a naive attempt at describing a complex, interconnected concept, such as a piece…
Explaining something to another human is hard for people "on the spectrum", in part because they don't have a strong "theory of mind".
Instead of understanding and/or inquiring how the other person's mind state differs from yours, and what gradual steps might lead them to greater understanding, they tend to treat people like a file system with a missing file, and stream the relevant data into them, assuming it will all be recorded.
This is not a simple problem to solve, but it can be done, and the first step is to realize the nature of the problem.
One simple process is getting feedback along the way. Instead of the 5 minute lecture, go step by step, and check that your counterpart has picked up what you're putting down.
Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#64For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience", this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it: > The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school pu…
Lol. Brutal
Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#65I am a lawyer who works with but doesn't do a MASSIVE amount of contract writing like some. I don't think "poor writing" is the right phrasing here, which implies ignorance or ineptitude. I think the reason contracts aren't readable to laypeople is because laypeople aren't the intended audience. We all know no one reads these, so we write them to future lawyers and courts who might want to get our clients in trouble.…
> I think the reason contracts aren't readable to laypeople is because laypeople aren't the intended audience. This doesn't make sense. The parties to the contract are presumably laypeople, and they have to understand it before they agree to it and sign it since one of the legal requirements for a valid contract is a meeting of the minds, meaning a common understanding between the parties of what each of them is agre…
IANAL,
How would you prove that? I think there are protected classes for that reason, but if some adult outside of such classifications signs they could ostensibly renege at any point under the pretense that they didn't understand, conversely I presume it would necessitate attorneys (or similar) at every contract signing to ensure it would be binding.
Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the parties are usually laypeople, the drafters and readers of significance are almost always lawyers. If you decide to try to bring a claim against your mortgage lender, will you have a lawyer read your mortgage agreement before you file suit? Surely.
Then what hope is there for a layperson to do anything of significance without first having a lawyer vet the EULA? Such agreements are already absurdly long for some of the most trivial services or products. The answer cannot become "be a lawyer or rich enough to afford retaining one".
There is no such hope, and that is the answer.
Much of this country is set up by and for lawyers, and that has consequences.
Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#67Lawyer and contract-drafting teacher here. The biggest problem with unreadable contracts is that we have too many L.O.A.D.s: Lazy Or Arrogant Drafters. (You can decide for yourself: L.O.A.D. of what?) There's a relevant Dilbert cartoon: [0] To simplify contract language, the biggest bang for the buck comes from SSSP: Short, Single-Subject Paragraphs, which are much easier to read; to review and revise during contract…
Thanks for sharing this. As you said, there is a very clear analogy to software factoring. Separating the definition of terms from the clauses relating them is very similar to factoring software logic out into functions.
In a way, bad legalese is even worse: at least hard-to-read code can be still be effortlessly and quickly executed by a computer. Every "execution" of your example contract will give someone a headache.
Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#68I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere, and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places). I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of the profession). In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for archaic language, cre…
American patents are written in a language that isn't English. It's very precise if you can learn to read it, though. The same seems to hold for contracts, but to a lesser degree.
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Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#69For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience", this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it: > The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school pu…
Whoever wrote or approved that should be fired. Whether they are a lawyer or politician, it matters not. To parse it one needs to write it out, draw brackets around concepts, and then add lines between the potentially-grouped concepts because there is so much in-between that you forget it all by the time you get to the end.
Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
#70I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere, and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places). I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of the profession). In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for archaic language, cre…
> Most other countries in the Anglosphere have been through a "plain english" language push in both contract & legislation The US has seen big pushes for plain English. Nixon, Carter, Clinton and, most recently, Obama have all championed this. It has been federal law since 2010 for all executive branch agencies to use plain language in any official document they produce, for instance. Similar desires in law and contr…
Yet the references you give are super recent. I guess that highlights my point somewhat?
This has been an issue since before Clinton (ie before my commercial experience) at the least.