Lawyerly Compounds
By this, I don’t mean where partners spend their week-ends. Instead, I have horrors like these in mind:
herein
therein
wherein
hereinafter
thereinafter
heretofore
herewith
therewith
aforementioned [or (shudder) its bastard progeny, ‘above-referenced’]
thereof
thereto
whereas
whereof
whereupon
hitherto
inasmuch as
notwithstanding
As Richard Wydick puts it, these words ‘give writing a legal smell, but they carry little or no legal substance. When they are used in writing addressed to non-lawyers, they baffle and annoy. When used in other legal writing, they give a false sense of precision and sometimes obscure a dangerous gap in analysis’ (Plain English for Lawyers, 5th ed (2005), 58).
Avoid that bad legal smell and don’t use words like these in your client piece – and think about ways to avoid them in legal drafting too.
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