Ok lawyers, listen up: I know you love defining things, but it’s all getting out of hand.
Somewhere in our quest for clarity, a few screws have come loose in the system and we’ve decided that for a letter to sound “lawyery” it needs to contain at least 786 definitions in each paragraph.
And it’s making me sad.
So, to combat the growing levels of insanity I thought I’d offer up a few things that there is absolutely no reason to define in correspondence.
These are pretty much all variations on a theme. That theme is: stating the bleeding obvious.
Clients
Unless each lawyer has multiple clients AND there is a chance that they might be confused between each other, you don’t need to define “our client” or “your client”.
I mean, surely it’s obvious that if I refer to “your client” I probably mean… your client.
Right?
Letters
So let’s say I’m replying to a single letter that you sent me. As is the custom of the day, I commence my letter with “We refer to your letter dated [date]”.
Guess what – by doing this, I don’t actually need to define “your letter”, for the astonishing reason that I’ve already told you what letter I’m talking about.
Unless you wrote my lots of letters and I’m replying to all of them, or there is any chance that my saying “your letter” later on might mean something else, we don’t need to waste time and energy creating a defined term here, surely?
Party Names
So we’re exchanging some chat about some large companies, like Moca-Mola Amital Limited, and Schmortescue Minerals Limited. The habit of the day is to ensure that we introduce these as (Moca-Mola) and (Schmortescue) the first time we mention them.
But why?
Will anyone actually be confused if I then just say “Moca-Mola” or “Schmortescue” later? Do you think I’m suddenly talking about completely different companies with the same lead names?
Answer: probably not. Because most people we’re writing to aren’t dumb.
Words You Never Use Again
You know what’s both fun and distressing at the same time? Playing a game in long letters to find all the defined terms that never actually get used.
Here’s what happens. Zealous lawyers and their keen eye for potential definitions start drafting a document, and along the way define literally everything they can think of that even sounds vaguely important.
And nobody goes back to check whether those vaguely important things every got spoken of every again.
Thus our little game is born. Try it.
I dare you.
Basically… Stop Auto-Pilot Definitions
Bearing in mind that I’m talking mostly about correspondence here, how about some simple rules before we liberally define every second word:
- If the word has only one possible interpretation, then don’t define it;
- If there is no potential for confusion at all, then don’t define it;
- Don’t treat your recipient like an idiot.
Over to you.