American Lawyer
(Boring wording). I used to be a lawyer for well known firm, let's call it "Something & Company". One particular client was an inhouse lawyer who worked for a giant US company. We were to produce an English law contract for her as they were doing something in the UK that required our input.

The contract was produced to my usual high standard but, no, this was not acceptable. It had to be redone in a particular style, i.e. same words but presented in a different format in terms of numbering, font, etc. "OK," say I, "That's now what the UK people who read it will expect but we can accommodate you - after all the client is always right." Nine drafts later, the words remained the same. The content remained the same. The legal effectiveness remained the same. However, the document had been renumbered, re-spaced, re-sized, re-indented, reformatted for US legal paper (despite being used in the UK on A4), re-everythinged short of actually changing the words. She even insisted that the name of the firm I worked for be changed from "Something & Company" to "Somethingandcompany".

All done happily on an hourly rate of £300. Probably £10,000 in finely tuning a perfectly good document that cost (a very reasonable) £3,000 in the first place.

tl'dr: boring lawyer does boring stuff to long document at whim of control freak which costs her lots of money
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 12:37, 17 replies)

Depends on what her position is.
I work with arbitrations. If a company wants to fuck with someone, the easiest way to do that is to make all the lawyers do a lot more work than necessary.

"Yes, we will require a 3 day oral hearing to resolve this $1,300 claim".
(username failed moderation, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 12:46, closed)

No other side
This was purely a standard template document to be used by sophisticated businesses as recipients. There as no opposition per se - a member of our client sales team would amend it, add special conditions then send it out to their client. Their client would then review the fine print with their contracts manager/inhouse lawyer. They would not care if it looked like x, y or z. Pure control freakery by my client. It tooks weeks rather than days to produce...
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 13:10, closed)

Then she should
be severely reprimanded.

By someone. Not you, obviously, you billed her 10 grand so she should be sent a case of decent claret at Christmas.
(username failed moderation, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 13:41, closed)

Needs more line breaks.

( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 13:46, closed)

Think you mean
Needs more: (a) line breaks.
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 13:48, closed)

And I should add that
I never get to see any part of that extra £10k. I was just a corporate cog in a giant legal machine churning out contracts where a £13k bill was small.
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 13:49, closed)

when i was a trainee in commprop
one of the secretaries came in to see me late one evening, crying her eyes out. she was sending out a contract for signing by two different people, and the beyond-anal partner kept sending it back to her, saying it was wrong.

she begged me to read it and see if i could find the problem. i have quite an anal eye (so to speak) myself for spelling and grammar, so i cockily took it off her. i couldn't see a problem. i read them both several times, but nothing.

eventually we both went in to see him, and said that we couldn't find it. he looked at us as if we were retarded.

"well," he said heavily, "if you can't see that one is stapled horizontally and the other vertically......" $*$*%^(%^*"$&*$*$% THEY ARE GOING TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE, YOU COCK LOLLIPOP.

she quit shortly after that. she was something like his 13th secretary in a year. meanwhile two of my colleagues had revenge sex on his desk one night, and one of them kicked out and smashed the picture of his pie-faced daughter to smithereens. i was sitting in the room with him when he bollocked the cleaner for that.

a desperately unpleasant man.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 14:30, closed)

no one gives a fuck

(Baggenfrock get fucked, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 15:15, closed)

except you and your toddler
no, wait.

WITH your toddler.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 16:10, closed)

Only of (minor) interest to Rachelswipe
So many anal partners...Takes the piss to call them "commercial lawyers". I was assistant to Partner A for a client who did a lot of similar transactions. Partner A was on hols so Partner B was called in to oversee the next transaction.

Client was very specific. They had just done an almost identical transaction and they wanted the SPA (i'm a corporate whore) to be the same as on the last deal. I had worked on the last deal and it really was almost a case of swapping the names, addresses and amounts.

Partner B was anal. He could not help tinkering. He could not help changing this clause to update this and that clause to make it match best practice. He had me work for 2 or 3 days solid (coming in for 7.00am) changing each clause almost one at a time, several times. Lo and behold after a week's solid work at a combined charge out of about £800/hr the client got the firm's standard document back - which bore absolutely no resemblance to the original or what the client wanted. Idiot.

I never had sex on his desk tho.
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 16:37, closed)

dear god
what a bell-end. this is why i only managed my corporate seat and ran screaming from the building when they asked me if i wanted to qualify there.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Mon 27 Oct 2014, 16:57, closed)

Bell Ends
I can imagine in that line of work there would be quite a few instances of complete tossery over single words and placement .of punctuation marks
(Wagane, Tue 28 Oct 2014, 6:13, closed)

boring fact for you
long contracts such as sale agreements, leases etc often do not have any punctuation marks in the clauses. this is to prevent them from having unwanted emphasis, or subsequent arguments over the meaning of the marks, eg whether a list is intended to be closed/exhaustive or not. so if you have a list, eg:

the tenant will put and keep in repair maintain decorate clean replace the carpets fixtures and fittings reinstate any damage from time to time as necessary

blah blah, you don't have any commas or anything else.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Tue 28 Oct 2014, 9:53, closed)

no one gives a fuck

(Baggenfrock get fucked, Tue 28 Oct 2014, 15:16, closed)

www.b3ta.com/questions/controlfreaks/post2400353
( rachelswipe with a fork, Tue 28 Oct 2014, 15:23, closed)

perhaps ...
... the giant US company was mad keen on a consistent brand image. They do do that sort of thing on websites ... so why not legal docs?
(haberman is singing in the changes, Tue 28 Oct 2014, 14:22, closed)

Nope
It was not a consumer facing contract and I know when we're being asked to make something in a consistent house style. This woman was just a nutter who wanted it done in her particular format. It obviously had elements of house style to it but she just wanted to control us down to the last full stop (sorry, period).
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Tue 28 Oct 2014, 16:13, closed)