[olefoo]

To the layman, much legalese looks and sounds repetitious because it is hedged with caveats and guards. It's precision is part of what makes it opaque. And yet, if one deciphers several T&C documents one starts to see similarities in structure and form. On this site full of people who are extremely adept at taking complex linguistic constructs and treating them as building blocks for even more complex structures, the temptation to abstract entire paragraphs into symbolic references is strong. We want to be able to minimize the cognitive load and maximise our understanding of the agreements we are being offered.

There is no legal equivalent to widely used open source libraries where one can go to the parts bin and pull out the functionality one needs and only that functionality. And yet most of the law firms I've worked with do have boilerplate documents that fit their practice. It's a knotty problem; lawyers and programmers operate under different constraints, and things that are obvious to one may be complete mysteries to the other.

If we had a legislature that worked and understood the internet, this sort of thing is exactly what they would be tackling...

[newbusox]

I couldn't agree more. Having worked at a large law firm, and with an offer to work for one in the near future, I am amazed at the amount of "cut and paste" resources these law firms have available at their disposal (including research, memoranda,briefs, etc.). It's unthinkable how much work is replicated from law firm to law firm, although I understand liability concerns and the way these law firms are constituted which make solving this problem (and lawyers likely see this as substantially less of a problem, given that they get paid to do this) very challenging. This plus the fact that most large law firms I am aware of are practically institutionally opposed to change (like implementing new technologies that might make the firm more efficient, or permitting the sort of ideas we're discussing here). Part of it is how lawyers are trained, part of it is how law firms operate, part of it is grounded in liability concerns... but, given how badly this recession has hurt the legal market, I am optimistic that we will see lawyers and law firms change for the better in the years to come--it's just going to take deep-seated institutional changes to get there.