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Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

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Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#81

Post by canjobear »

johndhi wrote: post #15

I 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.…

This is exactly the thesis that is refuted by the article. They find that the factors that make legal language hard to understand are the same factors that make any language hard for anyone to understand, for example long dependencies between related words in sentences. Nor do such constructions create ambiguities that might be useful later on: they just make the text harder for anyone to understand.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#82

Post by johndhi »

aliyeysides wrote: post #61

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/

This is interesting. I was thinking while reading this thread that it would be cool if there was a way to solve the problem.

My idea: get a significant percentage of users of a service to sign up for a 'union' of sorts to negotiate on their behalf. So you will boycott Facebook, along with 10million others, until they adjust their terms to at least make more sense (or ideally be a little more user friendly).

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#83

Post by _raoulcousins »

zo1 wrote: post #69
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

For 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.

Funny that I was about to comment "it doesn't seem so bad, just draw a directed graph to work it out". Reading your comment it does seem a little unreasonable.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#84

Post by kfarr »

I wish I could find the original link but I remember years ago a HN submission from a startup doing document summarization. The founder was on the discussion and responding to question about what documents are not possible to summarize with his software. Their response was after lots of research they determined that legal documents are the most challenging to summarize because they are intentionally obfuscated

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#85

Post by gnicholas »

A lot of this is driven by inertia. When a lawyer goes to write a contract, she'll typically start with a prior contract or form agreement. This will either be used as a template, or large chunks will be borrowed and modified as needed. In either case, the lawyer is unlikely to reword a bunch of provisions in an attempt to improve readability. It's like the legal version of Chesterton's Fence — if you don't know why a particular clause is phrased a particular way, you leave it as-is. Your client/partner might ding you if you include a boilerplate provision you shouldn't have, but you'd probably get in more trouble if you affirmatively reworded something and broke a cross-reference or other logical linkage that was supposed to remain in place.

As a result, language that was written a long time ago is still circulating in modern agreements. Note: I'm not defending any of this. As a lawer-turned-founder, I try to keep my agreements as short as possible!

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#86

Post by johndhi »

brnaftr361 wrote: post #42
zaphod420 wrote: post #3

Why can't they just use normal English language for contracts? How did it get to be this way?

It's about resolution, I think. What one needs functionally is a list of negations e.g. "thou shalt not"/"this does not" and affirmations "thou shalt"/"this does" most generally, the tightest feasible 95% CI - essentially bulletpoints. In looking at the human interaction space and regulating it, they're sort of trying to verbally describe the output of the Mandelbrot set while maintaining a coherent enough structure…

Accurate for law, too.

In a contract: -commercial lawyer drafts indemnity paragraph (based on weird world of commercial law) -ip lawyer drafts ip paragraph (based on weird world of ip law) -litigator drafts termination clause

Etc etc

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#87

Post by gnicholas »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #48

For 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…

Honestly, the ballotopedia summary [1] isn't much clearer! Looks like it passed overwhelmingly (87%), so presumably folks knew what it meant from TV ads? Or they were all successfully and massively misled by the other side's ads, and they had no idea what it meant!

1: https://ballotpedia.org/Texas_Proposition_1,_Property_Tax_Li...

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#88

Post by AlbertCory »

IANAL, but I AM a patent agent, which means I passed the Patent Bar. So I haven't dealt in contracts, but a lot of the same considerations apply to patent claims.

There is some claim language which is absolutely not required and any lawyer who uses it is just showing off. The article mentioned "aforesaid" which is a prime example in contracts (in patent claims, it's just "said").

For example:

A TCP packet, comprising TCP header and body, where said header comprises etc. etc.

-- or --

A TCP packet, comprising TCP header and body, where the header comprises etc. etc.

The second is absolutely as valid as the first. "The" is just as good as "said."

Another example:

What is claimed and desired to be secured by US Letters Patent, is

-- or --

I claim

The first one is just pretentious. It adds nothing.

Maybe you don't like "comprising"? Well, that one is specialized language.

A chair, comprising four legs, a seat, and a back

-- or --

A chair, consisting of four legs, a seat, and a back

The second is not just as good as the first. "Comprising" allows for the chair to have arms, while "consisting of" does not.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#89

Post by photochemsyn »

Here's a good example of 'center-embedded clauses' making a paragraph difficult to interpret - it's from the revamped USA-Canada-Mexico trade deal, specifically a side agreement between the USA and Canada on energy-related trade:

> "Each Party shall endeavor to ensure that energy-related activities that do not result in a facility exceeding its previously authorized capacity and that are limited to performing maintenance work on, or ensuring the safety of, existing cross-border infrastructure may be undertaken under the initial authorization and shall not require a new authorization."

Unpacking all this is rather difficult. The intent appears to be ensuring that energy-related activities should not require periodic re-authorization by a regulatory body after an initial authorization is granted. An example would certainly help - a cross-border power grid interconnect, say.

The embedded clauses are of two different kinds. If our grid interconnect doubles its capacity, this would be a violation of the first (restrictive) clause, and would thus require a new round of authorization. Under the second (permissive) clause, one can shut down the grid interconnect for safety or maintenance reasons. Taking the grid interconnect offline to restrict supply and jack up prices would thus be a violation, although one could monkey around with this (see Russia shutting down Nordstream to Europe for 'maintenance' at present).

That's just one paragraph, the document is hundreds of pages of this kind of thing.

Re: Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language

#90

Post by _ggwa »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #57
Quarrel wrote: post #28

I'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.

I'm a patent examiner and I can't agree with "It's very precise if you can learn to read it". A large fraction of patent applications I've worked on are unclear. I even wrote a linter to help catch some problems.

(DOC lawyers make me add this: This post is just my personal opinion, not that of the USPTO, DOC, US govt., etc.)

Edit: I will agree that patent claims can be precise, but so can normal English. I think patent claims are too often not precise.

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