Now THIS is Dorky

I'm on a board, and met as part of a subcommittee last night to work on redrafting some language for a possibly controversial change in our by-laws.  The two people I was working with were also JDs -- one's a partner in a firm in town, and the other is a therapist who went to law school.  We talked through the ends we were trying to achieve, asked one another threshhold questions and then proposed language that might enable the result we wanted, tested the language with horrible hypos to see whether the language would create unintended consequences.  We created definitions and referred to them in other places in the document.  I got to use (i) and (ii).  Do you know how long it's been since I've used those?  They don't come up in everyday life, I've discovered.  And we spoke to one another like drafters.  This is redundant after the definition in section A.  Do we need to change this term in the second paragraph, or is it clear the way it is?  We did a few things that were inelegant from a drafting point of view in order to make the document clearer to non-lawyers and to change less of it -- we permitted some redundancies, and we left untouched a section of previously drafted language that could be cleaned up.

Anyway, the dorky part was that it was fun.  It was late, after practice, and I hadn't eaten dinner, but I sat there with my computer redlining a document and reading back the amended paragraphs, drinking a glass of red wine, for two hours, and I enjoyed it. 

Comments

[Bill Altreuter]

I love doing that. I'm on a committee that proposes and evaluates changes to our code of civil proceedure, and although I'm not as good at it as I wish I was, it is great to see people who are good at it work their magic. By-laws are fun, too. I've been part of by-law revision for two not-for-profits, and you are absolutely correct-- it is geeky fun all around.

[Charlie Simpson]

You are a dork -- if "dork" means "incredibly talented, intelligent, interesting legal genius!" Your legal skills sound so amazing from this post.

Here's a request to test your dorkiness: what did you get on both the SAT's and the L-SAT's? Don't be shy. I'm sure there quite oustanding.

[Jill]

That does sound pleasurable.

[turboglacier]

I am glad there are people out there who do these things.

[pjm]

One of my professors told us about a recent paper which postulated that legal language (unlike regular English) could be reliably machine-parsed and rendered in a machine-usable format, making it possible to (for example) define a security policy and use software to validate it against HIPPA.

I am impressed by people who can see these things and imagine the consequences.