[jgfoot]

I am a lawyer, and I also write Perl (although I am more partial to Python or JavaScript and when I am feeling really smart I work in Haskell).

Contracts are English, and there is no reason why a skilled, competent lawyer cannot write a contract that is both easy for non-lawyers to understand and also enforceable in Court. There are lots of bad contracts out there because there aren't many clients willing to pay a lawyer to re-engineer poorly written contracts that are nonetheless believed to "work," i.e. be interpreted by a court in a predictable manner. Every experienced coder has seen the same phenomenon: if a body of code has been written, re-written, and patched over time, it probably looks pretty awful now and could stand a good deal of refactoring, but does anyone do that? Witness the OP, who apparently found a form somewhere and is trying to edit it to his purposes.

It's not like contracts are written in a secret language. There is a background body of knowledge that is helpful to have in writing and reading them, but it is also crucial to understand the industry involved.

[rodrigo]

Offtopic, im an Hacker/lawyer myself, im interested to get your hindsigth on being that. for starters, do you use your coding skills in law related matters?

[adilsaleem]

what bothers me is that people consider lengthy, complex and un-understandable contracts better than easy and simple ones. having said that, a lot of people also consider weird looking code superior to simple but equivalent code