I've seen this type of thing a couple of times before. Sometimes it works better than others. The best example I've seen is just little italicized blurbs marked (intent) before each barrage of law-speak. There was, of course, a sizable disclaimer about how the italicized parts were not legally binding yadda-yadda. It was on a car rental contract of all places.
Its kind of like comments on code, so that if the legal code doesn't run correctly on the courthouse hardware, everyone can at least tell what the programmer was trying to do.
The right solution is to go back and clean up 400 years of worthless cruft that's built up in the legal system that makes law documents quite literally another language, with the added confusion that it borrows words from a familiar one but assigns them new meanings and connotations. I was always of the opinion that if I should be required to follow an agreement, then I should be reasonably expected to be able to read it myself.
I read somewhere that Steve Jobs tore up a long contract and demanded a new one that was one page long if the other party wanted to do business with Apple. Lots of people demanding such contracts are the only way things will change.
I can't imagine this happening, though, as lawyers would need to write these contracts and greatly simplifying contracts would probably put many of them out of a job.
In addition, many people with their shorter contracts would be shocked when a judge rules against their interpretation of the contract, and others will complicate their contracts to prevent the same thing happening to them. This is likely the process that led to the contracts we have now. Legalese is not intended to be clear and expressive, but as a kind of adversarial form of communication.
IANAL, but I think many of them write complicated contracts mostly in an effort to protect their clients. Simple contracts may not include verbiage that has survived court challenges.
I'm not trying to defend the system, just pointing out that lawyers aren't necessarily trying to do anything but make the system work for their clients -- which is what they got hired to do. If we want simpler language, we need legal decisions that will back it up.
This is a myth. Most contracts are not even written down and are perfectly legal.
For example if you're in a restaurant and order food you have accepted a contract to pay for that food once you finish. The contract does not include any legalese it isn't even written down, yet is just as valid if not more so as any 100 page document filled with legalese.
If this is so you can also write it in plain English. Anything that can be written in legalese can almost always be rewritten in more concise plain readable English.
That's the cruft I'm speaking of. The courts are almost slaves to precedent, no matter how bogus that precedent might be. Every time some high-moneyed legal team rams through some bogus bit of jargon, it appends itself verbatim to all of the contracts after that, almost like a macro, or worse, a virus.
Like our own dna, over the years the simple genomes get loaded down with crap that has nothing whatsoever to do with the creature but replicates nonetheless.
Its kind of like comments on code, so that if the legal code doesn't run correctly on the courthouse hardware, everyone can at least tell what the programmer was trying to do.
The right solution is to go back and clean up 400 years of worthless cruft that's built up in the legal system that makes law documents quite literally another language, with the added confusion that it borrows words from a familiar one but assigns them new meanings and connotations. I was always of the opinion that if I should be required to follow an agreement, then I should be reasonably expected to be able to read it myself.