I fought the law (and the law won)

Many years ago, as a budding adult, I dabbled with law as a subject and briefly considered it as a career. I was initially attracted by the Latin phraseology and case-law precedents, before being repulsed by the absurdly long hours and the underlying principle that everyone says black is black until some half-dead fop in a wig says it’s actually grey, and then everyone starts saying black is grey instead. You might as well write opposing rules on either side of a thousand playing cards, chuck them all in the air, and declare that whatever lands face-side up is now the law of the land.

I gave up on law as a career quite quickly, but the recent receipt of a legal missive has brought its labyrinthine nature back into my mind. To condense a long story into a blog post, I was asked to sign a contract document from a copywriting client, and a couple of excerpts from this document caught my eye as being at best laboriously verbose, and at worst completely baffling. And bear in mind that I’m smarter than the average bear when it comes to translating this sort of stuff – I make a lucrative living out of reducing complex topics into easily-digestible bite-sized chunks of copywriting.

If, for any reason, the Company becomes liable to pay, or shall pay, any such taxes, the Company shall be entitled to deduct from any amounts payable to the Consultant pursuant to this Agreement (including, for the avoidance of doubt any amounts prospectively payable) all amounts so paid or required to be paid by it and, to the extent that any taxes so paid or required to be paid by the Company exceeds the amount payable by the Company to the Consultant pursuant to this Agreement, the Consultant shall forthwith pay to or reimburse the Company with an amount equal to such excess.

Not bad, eh? Eight commas and 103 words, all fighting for breathing space in a single sentence. However, that paragraph is worthy of an award from the Plain English Campaign compared to this example, from the next page of the document:

Each provision of this agreement shall be construed separately and (save as otherwise expressly provided herein) none of the provisions hereof shall limit or govern the extend, application or construction of any other of them and, notwithstanding that any provision of this agreement may prove to be unenforceable, the remaining provisions of this agreement shall continue in full force and effect.

Doesn’t that simply translate as “this agreement is binding unless it isn’t”? If that is the message it’s conveying, why does it occupy a 61-word sentence, when I’ve condensed its essence into seven words? Surely the remaining 54 words aren’t required purely to prevent people finding loopholes they can exploit? Perhaps someone was being paid by the word, or maybe they were trying to confuse idiots (in which case, job done). Regardless of the reasons behind such unnecessary verbosity, documents like this underline why I probably made a good decision dropping law as an academic subject, and concentrating on English instead. It isn’t just Latin phraseology that might as well be a different language when it comes to translating the letters of the law.