To be fair, the modern legal writing curriculum advises you against adopting what might be termed the classic "legalese" style that most people are familiar with from reading product warranties & such. Opaque or redundant phrases like "notwithstanding anything hereunder" and "wanton, willful and unlawful" are deprecated.

Still, despite the lawyerly penchant for outline-style numbering of headings in documents (I, II, III ... A, B, C), any group of items that might well lend itself to a bullet list is inevitably spun out into a full paragraph of prose.

That was a habit I used to have, until it was drilled out of me when I was working -- you always have to assume you have access to the shortest attention span possible. So lengthy, expository prose, while perhaps accurate and beautifully written, is never preferred over a bullet list, simply because the list is more likely to be read.

Perhaps there's an economic explanation. Most businesspeople are salaried and are not directly billing their hours back to a customer; so they are motivated to get the most done per unit of time.

Whereas for a lawyer in private practice, billable hours are everything, so there's no motivation to create documents that communicate concisely, for either the writer or the reader. (Cutting the other way: it's usually more time-consuming to write a really good short document than a long one.)

The truth is, most legal documents could be shorter. Once, when I needed a non-disclosure agreement, I commissioned one from my lawyer with the stipulation that it fit on one side of a business card. He did it, and I used it.

08 Feb 05