One of the results of the word processing era is just how easy it is to simply cut-and-paste things, and perhaps no profession has made more use of this than lawyers. We’ve seen it where lawyers include the name of the a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080601/1542541281.shtml”wrong defendant/a in a lawsuit, for example. Now, a court in the UK has a href=”http://www.out-law.com//default.aspx?page=9415″ target=”_new”slammed some lawyers for practicing boilerplate cut #038; paste lawyering/a, noting that a drafted contract was so meaningless at points that it’s clear the lawyer who drafted it had no idea what parts of it were talking about. The court noted “malapropisms, poor uses of terms and drafting errors” all of which “made interpretation of the agreement difficult.”
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In fact, it was so extreme that the judge actually looked to figure out what was most likely imeant/i between the two original parties, rather than what the actual contract says. This is pretty rare, as most courts tend to default to the actual text of a contract, rather trying to get into what was meant, as that opens up all sorts of questions. Yet, in this case, what was actually in the contract was apparently so terribly written that the court decided to go in the other direction.
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