The recent Ig Nobel Prize Winning work "Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language" by Martínez, Mollica, and Gibson demonstrates that contracts are written in language that is harder to understand than other genres such as academic or media writing. In particular, center-embedded clauses are used at more than twice the rate in contracts than in other professional writing except newspapers, lead to long-distance syntactic dependencies and are recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these clauses.

Why is this? One would have thought that making contracts understandable to the parties would generally be in everyone best interest, but it is possible to imagine situations where this is not the case.

Abstract of the paper: //

Contract drafting is highly decentralized and change happens only when there is a powerful impetus for change.

Does this mean that legal writing can't be improved?

No.

Some lawyers are excellent writers in both contract drafting and in court documents.

A well drafted contact can reduce litigation costs when there are disputes. It can also increase compliance with the intent of the parties by preventing disputes over what the contract means from arising in the first place.

But most lawyers are mediocre contract drafters, and there is little selective pressure in transactional legal work to weed out their sub-optimal writing styles.

Bryan A. Garner, who among other things is the editor of Black's Law Dictionary, is pretty much the leading figure in the United States pushing for a more modern, more readable, less flabby legal writing style. This is exemplified, for example, in his book "Legal Writing in Plain English" (2d ed. 2013).

But even then, a lot of the impetus for his stylistic decisions was primarily driven by the need to get across ideas clearly, in a minimum of words, when writing appellate briefs with word limits. This is also the main context in which legal writing is taught in law school and continuing education classes.

In contracts, in contrast, in our current era of the word processor, long documents are easy to deliver, and long passages of writing can be cut and pasted. So, the same outside pressures to limit word counts and persuade judges who will read legal briefs cover to cover in order, are not present when drafting contracts. So, the pressure to have a succinct plain language writing style in contracts is less strong.

This said, when there has been regulatory pressure to write consumer contracts in a way that an average consumer can understand, it can be done.

For example, most credit card agreements are written in very clear plain English with a very low reading level compared to other contracts.

But those easy to read credit card agreements are drafted by committees of many lawyers and senior executives, each charging hundreds of dollars an hour, over many meetings over a period of weeks of debate and refinement, and a cost of many tens of thousands of dollars each to draft.

The flabby and clunky character of legal writing also reflects client imposed budgetary constraints. It takes much more time and effort, with multiple rounds of rewriting and editing, to write a clean, easy to read contract than it does to write a kludgy one.

Lawyers bill by the hour and clients want the job done at a price that they can afford. There is little incentive in contracts that will not be used many times as forms, to take the effort to produce a clean, easy to read final product. This kind of beautifully drafted contract costs much more to draft for the client, but provides little additional legal benefit to the client.

Few contracts are ever litigated at all, and when they are, the legal drafting tends to focus on only a handful of key provisions that are carefully drafted. Boilerplate language, which is often less carefully drafted, is very rarely litigated, so the quality of that writing doesn't matter much. ///

And the answer is a perfect example of lengthy writing, although very clearly presented!