Where there’s a Will, there’s a Shall (June 2011)

Just signed my spankin’ new Will and Testament.  Just a brief and cautionary note:  Make certain you get your Will in place as early as possible.  Not because you might die sudden and young, but because if you wait past 60 or so, your mind might not be able to understand all the gibberish and legalese.  I read revisions carefully five times and asked dozen of questions.  The answers seemed clear and rational for a few hours before comprehension began to fade and confusion return.

These lawyers are like old-time Catholic priests before vernacular liturgy.  Latin or Legalese sound so profound and thorough, with every empty space between words and thoughts occupied and cast in stone, bulwarks against misunderstanding and challenge.  But we peasants can only pray or hope the content has real meaning and the style prettifies real substance.

Entering college as pre-law back in the ‘60s, I was focused on litigation, moot court, and advocacy.  Now the thought of dealing with arcane language would push me back toward an occupation I considered as a teenager:  Jesuit priest/scholar.  Latin and Aramaic would seem equally accessible.

You’ve got to wonder whether older attorneys come to rely on their associates, paralegals, and boilerplate, tending to lose their ‘language’ skills with time, like I have my French, German, and Hindi.

Imagine a subtle and sublime hacker, melted like cheap cheese into in his broken swivel chair, surrounded by  empty pizza boxes and Red Bull cans, busting into a major law firm’s directory of forms and boilerplate, randomly switching prepositions, hereins to wherefores and hereafters, -ees  to -ers , coulds to shoulds and woulds.

Castle walls would (or could) fall, decades of acrimony, litigation, appeal, and hair-pulling would shake business and personal relationships.

Not that I’m suggesting anyone trying this.  It wouldn't be right...

I was thinking how what I would like to see is legal documents presented like Folger Library editions of Shakespearean plays:  the original legalese like Elizabethan dialogue on one page and explanations, glossaries, and background supplied on the facing page.