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More Than A Mouthful.
“The minute you read something you don’t understand, you
can be almost sure it was
drawn up by a lawyer.”
-- Will Rogers –
We’d like to welcome you to this month’s issue
of the Lawyers Stink E-mail Newsletter. While we certainly hope that you
are doing well and enjoying a day free of lawyers, there’s no doubt that
keeping lawyers out of your daily existence is getting tougher and tougher
with each passing hour. Lawyers seem to be here and there and everywhere –
with their hands (grabbing for even more money, of course) in just about
everything. To that end, today we’re going to talk about lawyers and all
of the pile of legal mumbo jumbo lawyers create.
As we state in our Online Legal Dictionary (click
here to review our own
version of legal terms and definitions), attorneys and lawyers (and all
those other hotshot names they call themselves -- including counselor,
barrister, attorney at law and so on and so forth) have masterfully
concocted their own legal language. This legal lingo, a puzzling potpourri
of legal terms and definitions which absolutely no one can understand
(including the majority of lawyers themselves), has provided lawyers a way
to keep their clients off balance and out of kilter while managing to pry
monstrous sums of money out of the clients’ pockets – all at the same
time.
The inherent ambiguity of lawyer-speak has always provided lawyers the
upper hand when dealing with their clients. Since most of us don’t have a
clue what in the blue blazes these multiple syllable monstrosities mean,
lawyers have made a living charging you and me and everyone else a fortune
to decipher this maze of gobbledygook.
This legal mumbo jumbo is really quite a stroke of genius. I guess these
lawyers are actually smarter than they look, but in reality that wouldn’t
take much, would it? Anyway, if the lawyers can manage to draft a document
or contract loaded with melee-mouthed words such as heretofore,
hereinafter, hereunder and the like, they can ostensibly make the document
unreadable. Don’t kid yourself. These lawyers know exactly what they’re
doing. By concocting their own legal terms and definitions, they have
developed a language that insures future business for themselves.
Come on, how often do you actually see these types of words while skimming
the newspaper or reading your favorite novel? Never, thank goodness.
Therein lies the method to their madness. By consistently writing in a
style that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, lawyers have successfully
fostered an air of mystique where legal documents are concerned.
Regular folks, rendered helpless in deciphering the legal mumbo jumbo,
need lawyers to draft legal documents that have all those fancy words in
them and also need lawyers to decode legal instruments prepared by other
lawyers. Lawyers know full well that if they simply authored these
documents in a manner in which anyone could understand them in the first
place, their high priced services wouldn’t be needed.
As we state in Chapter Two of our highly acclaimed book, It’s Time to Wake
Up and Smell the Lawyers (click book chapter summaries to review excerpts
from book), lawyers will continue to keep drafting ten page documents
loaded with heavy weight words and keep on charging their clients hundreds
if not thousands of dollars for a contract that could have simply said,
“John is buying the trailer from Bob for five hundred bucks.” Nice gig.
Nobody, and I do mean nobody, writes the way a lawyer does and who would
want to? After all, we generally want people to understand whatever it is
we are writing. Just the opposite premise holds true for lawyers. Keeping
us in the dark keeps the money rolling in. Nine times out of ten, if
someone needs to review one of these legal documents for themselves, they
can’t. They have to have a lawyer “look over the papers”.
The more difficult it is for the average mom and pop to read this
seemingly incomprehensible collection of legal gibberish, the more
essential the lawyer appears. How many times have you overheard someone
saying “I need to have the lawyer draw up some legal documents”? Plenty of
times, I would wager. Maybe you’ve even run down to the lawyer’s office to
have him or her look over some papers for you. Boy, do they have us
trained – or what?
In truth, lawyers could make up words and we probably wouldn’t even
notice. As a matter of fact, isn’t that what they do already? Messing with
people’s minds by messing with the English language is the name of the
game. Good grief.
Contrary to what lawyers would lead you to believe, legal mumbo jumbo is
not essential on legal documents and in most cases, it’s not even helpful.
Contractual agreements are best expressed in simple, straight forward,
every day English.
More than a mouthful? You can say that again.
As we always do here at
Power-of-Attorney.com, we wish you a lawyer free day!
Hey, if you’ve got a goofy lawsuit you’d like to pass on to us, simply
click
Stupid Lawsuits and Other Funny Stuff and we’ll add yours to
our ever growing list of stupid lawsuits.
And while you’re at in, why not take a few moments and check out our
growing collection of
Funny Lawyer
Quotes, Jokes and Cartoons?
It’s
Time to Wake Up and Smell the Lawyers
Book: If you haven’t read our highly acclaimed book, you’re missing out on
a load of information about America’s legal system – and a load of laughs
as well. You can read excerpts taken from the book by clicking
book
chapter summaries here.
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Thanks for reading this issue of the Lawyers Stink E-mail Newsletter and
we’ll see you next month. As always, we welcome your comments and
suggestions about our newsletter.
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