Boiler plates

I noticed an advertisement in the first issue of my shiny new subscription to the NYRB for a book which went over the extensive use of long boilerplate texts in the contracts for all kinds of commercial transactions. And which, to judge by the puff prose, was thought to be a bad thing. Demeaning to the noble trade of lawyering?

I have not gone as far as buying the book which might be interesting but might also be impenetrable to a non-lawyer. But I did get as far as pondering on the periphery on the way home from town this morning.

One experience with boiler plate has been with the contracts which accompany the private sector doing very well out of government IT. There was a time when an outfit called CCTA went to a lot of time and trouble to devise and agree with the trade a standard form of contract which should have needed very little tweaking for any particular contract. Big savings all round, or at least that was the idea. But by the time I finished I was witness to the hiring of some swanky commercial lawyers from the city to crawl over a proposed contract, a contract perhaps to the value of tens of millions of pounds, in the first decade of this century. Presumably our swanky lawyers talked to the vendor's swanky lawyers, we eventually got a contract - which we quite possibly never looked at again - and the swanky lawyers trousered the dough. I would guess that the swanky lawyers' bill was a very small number of hundreds of thousands of pounds, so perhaps a percent or two of the contract value. But an example, nevertheless, where the idea was to do boilerplate, but where the plates had come unstuck.

Then there is buying a house, which one might have thought was a fairly routine transaction, certainly more routine than buying a computer system. The first time that we bought a property, a flat as it happened, I tried to read the contract before I signed it and got very bogged down in the prose which tried to define what part of the block was down to me and what part was down to the freeholder. Prose which was full of rather ancient sounding words; perhaps demesne was one of them. Not sure where the prose came from, this being the days before word processors had reached the offices of provincial solicitors. It was not a form, so maybe it had actually been copy typed from the previous contract, just for me? The lawyer was rather surprised that I even tried to read the thing; I suppose that that was what he thought, quite reasonably, that I was paying him for. And then, more recently, despite the best efforts of  New Labour to make the Land Registry accessible, I chickened out of DIY and got lawyers to handle the various operations arising from FIL's house in Devon. An example where boilerplate is the ideal but which we have not quite attained.

A more common experience with boiler plate is all the stuff in microscopic print which accompanies all kinds of retail transactions. The vendor, involved in lots of similar transactions, can afford to invest in lawyer time to write all this microscopic print, microscopic print which goes, one assumes, to limit their liability if things go pear shaped. But who reads all this stuff on the buyer side? Not many buyers, I don't suppose. And the transactions don't warrant hiring even slummy lawyers to read it for you. Maybe consumer organisations like the Consumers' Association (see http://www.consumersinternational.org/. I was pleased to see that his outfit is active in Afghanistan amongst other places) get in on the act, but I have never heard of such a thing. Do we just have to rely on an agony aunt in the money part of a weekend newspaper when the vendor starts reading the microscopic print back to one as part of refusing to sort out this or that problem?

On the up side there is sometimes talk of signing the small print not affecting one's statutory rights. So perhaps I can rest easy in the knowledge that my statutory rights are on the case.

Turning to the matter of grub, very impressed by a gilt head sea bream yesterday which BH had turned up under offer at Sainsbury's. Don't recall having such a thing before, but it baked very well for lunch. One fish per person was about right, with each fish being about the length of a kipper, albeit of rather different shape. Followed up by pork soup for tea - water, pork, barley, onion and white cabbage, with the liquor strengthened with a little mashed potato left over from the fish. That went down very well too.

PS: slightly annoyed this afternoon to find that I now have five task bar like things at the top of this screen. I am sure it did not used to be so many. Shall I devote quality time to trying to get rid of any of them? And then Norton flavoured things are starting to poke themselves into Google search screens - the whole point of Norton for me being invisible protection. I might pay for it but I don't want to see it. And then there is a problem with the Windows search feature which can no longer find important files for me. Shall I devote quality time to talking to the usually helpful - but time consuming - BT help desk?