> If you google "how do I write my own contract" you go down a rabbit hole of impossible to reconcile contradictions and absurdity.
I find legal drafting and programming to be remarkably similar. And I think you get the same rabbit holes when googling either way, but when you're developing the feedback you get for the "solution" you found on Google is almost immediate. The function either works as you expected or it doesn't. When you're drafting an agreement you might not find out that the snippet of legalese you found worked in a way you hadn't anticipated for years, or decades later, if ever.
There's also the added complication that the law is constantly changing. When you're developing you know you're using Language X v10. And when the meaning of a reserved word needs to change, everyone upgrades to v11. We can't (yet!) update all of our contracts every time a court ruling calls the interpretation of a clause into question. Add to that the complication that sometimes the courts don't even agree on the interpretation of something for years. It's as though a team of programmers are all working on the same project without a GitHub repo.
I find legal drafting and programming to be remarkably similar. And I think you get the same rabbit holes when googling either way, but when you're developing the feedback you get for the "solution" you found on Google is almost immediate. The function either works as you expected or it doesn't. When you're drafting an agreement you might not find out that the snippet of legalese you found worked in a way you hadn't anticipated for years, or decades later, if ever.
There's also the added complication that the law is constantly changing. When you're developing you know you're using Language X v10. And when the meaning of a reserved word needs to change, everyone upgrades to v11. We can't (yet!) update all of our contracts every time a court ruling calls the interpretation of a clause into question. Add to that the complication that sometimes the courts don't even agree on the interpretation of something for years. It's as though a team of programmers are all working on the same project without a GitHub repo.
Source: Lawyer who codes.