back to article Judge attacks 'bits of legal boilerplate, bolted together'

A court has attacked lawyers who let word processors do their thinking for them. Standard paragraphs are being bolted together to make nonsensical agreements, said a High Court ruling on Friday. A company seeking to make fuel more efficient and less polluting and a nanotechnology company signed an agreement about how to …

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  1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Clintonisms.

    Hurray for the judge. Of course, as a consequence, contracts will now see additional paragraphs bolted onto them explicitating in details the meanings of the work "or" and "application".

    Also, injecting lanthanoids into fuel? Aren't these like, radioactive?

  2. Chris
    Stop

    Who'd have thought it?

    Especially when it's done by immensely rich global companies with highly paid legal departments...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And only a couple of days after

    the world first laughed its socks off at the inappriateness of the Google Chrome EULA.

    (Apologies to everyone else posting on the same meme).

  4. Frank
    Thumb Up

    Use an Engineer

    I've seen technical requirement specifications with similar problems to those described in this article. They were usually cobbled together by managers and had a quick polish from marketing types. I shudder to think what can happen to a document after a lawyer gets hold of it.

    In all cases, any important documentation should be reviewed by someone who is not involved in the project and maybe doesn't even work for the companies concerned. Let's face it, if millions of pounds/dollars will be generated/spent as a result of this, you might as well put a couple more thousand in up front to get it right. What happens is that people who more or less understand the situation apply an internal mental filter to anything that isn't clear, turning it into something that fits their own internal mental model. Hence, to them, the document makes sense.

    If you gave to an independent and experienced person (especially an engineer) you'd soon be asked questions like 'what does that mean?', 'what happens if X then Y, because that situation doesn't seem to be covered?' These and more embarrassing questions would flow like water.

    It wont happen though because it's terrifying and embarrassing to have your work looked at and then criticised by someone who isn't afraid of you screwing up their career progress :)

  5. Robert Grant

    In a happy irony...

    ...this Reg article doesn't contain any obvious grammar/spelling/jargon failures. Hooray!

  6. Solomon Grundy

    Malapropisms

    I thought those were extinct.

  7. Edward Barrow

    not unusual

    This is exactly the same practice which cased the cockup with Google's Chrome EULA.

    Incidentally the learned judge is one of the authors of that fine tome "The Modern Law of Copyright and Designs", the second edition of which is available for a very reasonable £556 on Amazon.

  8. Tim Gardener
    Unhappy

    What no google?

    For some reason the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the headline was that this was going to be another Google/Chrome related article.

    I'm kind of disappointed that it isn't.

  9. Luther Blissett

    A bit challenging for Reg readers?

    Alliteration? Yes! Hyperbole Yes!! Polysemantics? Yes!!! Ambiguity? er maybe. Typos? Definitely.

    But malapropism - have I even spelled it correctly?

  10. Britt Johnston
    Heart

    Required reading

    for those who invented something useful for their company, and are asked to sign off on the legalese.

  11. RW

    An excellent example of The Law at its best

    But also making it clear that drafting legal documents of nearly any kind isn't a job for amateurs, not even for lawyers without specialized experience. That's why in government circles you will find back rooms occupied by "legislative counsel", who make sure that proposed laws are drafted with due care so they mean what their proposers mean them to mean. (Except perhaps under NuLabour's smiling and beneficent regime where egalitarianism assigns such tasks to teen-aged secretaries.)

    One almost wonders if the agreements drafted by managers and polished by marketing wonks (mentioned in passing by "Frank") represent the practice of law by non-lawyers....

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @AC: "posting on the same meme"?

    posting on the same whatnow?

    - scientific authority invents a word to describe the concept of "ideas that take off"

    - no-one bar the chap in question, half a dozen journos and a dozen sad tech freaks ever use the word.

    you couldn't make it up. (well, er, he did.)

    ps is it "meam" when we go all phonetic?

  13. Sooty

    I understand the application bit

    but I'm really struggling to see how anyone could interpret A or B to possibly mean A and B?

    If somebody did both, that would be more of a legal issue. Its definitely not an xor, but that would be one for the lawyers, claiming paying royalties for both, didn't fulfil the contract to pay for one or the other :)

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: Isn't a job for amateurs

    Well, if the amateur sticks to saying how they want the agreement to work, explains the sentiment of the agreement, tries to cover all scenarios and most importantly doesn't try to sound like they're a lawyer they could well do a better job.

    The law doesn't require that we use long words or their whacky terminology you know.

    This also highlights the importance of standardised language, again. Cum fonetic spelin hu nos wot a contract wil meen?

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Sooty

    It is all in the semantics

    In common English A or B means A xor B

    In logic A or B means A or B or (A and B)

    in real English:

    "you can have an apple *or* an orange" -> implies either but not both

    "you cannot drive if you are drunk *or* unlicensed" -> does not imply you are legal to drive if both pissed and banned at the same time.

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