[xnorswap]

In the case of lawyers though, it's more akin to paying someone to find and document edge cases.

That tends to end up verbose.

In the case of other realms, it's just padding because previously word-count was a metric used as a proxy for quality or depth of analysis.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

In effect, we pay lawyers to be ridiculously pedantic for us where pedanticism is required or desired.

That level of pedanticism elsewhere, though, is incredibly annoying or precisely what is not desired.

[efitz]

I’ve wondered from time to time if we could replace some of the wordiness of laws and legal documents with bullet lists. For example, a trial about some interpretation of a word in a law could be contributed back to the law as a bullet point that says, “this also applies if …”.

[xnorswap]

What you're describing is law, most of it is bullet points, take for example the computer misuse act 1990, section 1:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/1

Or if you're more patient, the whole lot:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/crossheading/co...

It's all bullet points.

[FredPret]

> a trial about some interpretation of a word in a law could be contributed back to the law as a bullet point that says, “this also applies if …”.

Is this not what happens in case law?

[efitz]

The law doesn’t literally get updated with a bullet point. Subsequently attorneys have to do ever greater searches to analyze all the precedents.