With the further caveat that I'm clueless about bookmarking services, I can only think two things: (1) that in the you're-the-product way you were discussing a few days ago, this service is looking to somehow make a product out of a user's selection of things to bookmark, though damned if I see how that would work; and (2) that this language sounds even more like the product of lawyers' fondness for models than it did earlier. And I had already suspected that it was a product of the lawyers using a model that didn't quite fit and then not troubling to customize it.
The models issue is something that pops up over and over in legal practice. For obvious reasons, it's much easier to draft a document by finding something that looks more or less like what you want to do and making whatever modifications are needed than it is to draft one from scratch. Drafting something de novo means that you have to think about every single bit of it, what issues need to be covered, how you're going to word them, what you might have left out the first seventeen times you thought about this, whether your language really does what you hoped it did for each paragraph, and on and on. It takes a long time, and it's expensive to do, so nobody does it unless they really have no choice.
So everyone goes looking for models, and a lot of the time they find things that are more or less right, or at least address some of the same issues as they think they need to address, but that aren't perfect matches to what they need to do. And they sit down to adapt them, borrowing language where it's possible, inserting extra provisions where they need something that isn't in the model, and so on. And then they look at the finished document, and see that there's language in the model that addresses issues that they don't necessarily have in their situation. If it's dead wrong, in ways that will cause a problem or look obviously stupid, they'll take that extra language out.
But the rest of the time? Everyone will leave it in. Because (a) why not?; and (b) maybe you're wrong about not really needing it, other people obviously thought they needed it, how sure are you that they're not right?; and (c) if you don't understand what it was doing there at all, you'd better not even think about taking it out because what if it's doing something really important that you missed?
And because this is the dynamic, the problem replicates itself, with increasing elaborations, with every single iteration. I don't have any actual knowledge of the circumstances of drafting here, obviously, so I can't be absolutely sure this is what happened. But I will say that it strikes me as highly, highly likely.
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Date: 16 Oct 2011 10:57 pm (UTC)The models issue is something that pops up over and over in legal practice. For obvious reasons, it's much easier to draft a document by finding something that looks more or less like what you want to do and making whatever modifications are needed than it is to draft one from scratch. Drafting something de novo means that you have to think about every single bit of it, what issues need to be covered, how you're going to word them, what you might have left out the first seventeen times you thought about this, whether your language really does what you hoped it did for each paragraph, and on and on. It takes a long time, and it's expensive to do, so nobody does it unless they really have no choice.
So everyone goes looking for models, and a lot of the time they find things that are more or less right, or at least address some of the same issues as they think they need to address, but that aren't perfect matches to what they need to do. And they sit down to adapt them, borrowing language where it's possible, inserting extra provisions where they need something that isn't in the model, and so on. And then they look at the finished document, and see that there's language in the model that addresses issues that they don't necessarily have in their situation. If it's dead wrong, in ways that will cause a problem or look obviously stupid, they'll take that extra language out.
But the rest of the time? Everyone will leave it in. Because (a) why not?; and (b) maybe you're wrong about not really needing it, other people obviously thought they needed it, how sure are you that they're not right?; and (c) if you don't understand what it was doing there at all, you'd better not even think about taking it out because what if it's doing something really important that you missed?
And because this is the dynamic, the problem replicates itself, with increasing elaborations, with every single iteration. I don't have any actual knowledge of the circumstances of drafting here, obviously, so I can't be absolutely sure this is what happened. But I will say that it strikes me as highly, highly likely.