Legal and lawyer types: why do legal documents put numbers in parentheses after the words? eg “you may submit two (2) letters…”
I understand the general idea of clarity and precision, but is there a historical reason for this? words for numbers are even harder to rubout and manipulate… “seven” is nothing like “four” what started this? or is it even a real thing?
@futurebird My experience as a former lawyer is that most of the lawyers who do this don't know either and are just copy-pasting from other lawyers.
A "fun" variation of this is when people describe a mathematical formula in a legal document and you have to write things like "the quotient of the product of the number of shares multiplied by the outstanding number of shares, altogether divided by the total number of parties listed in Exhibit B..."
@futurebird: Oh, and in some handwritings, seven and four do look alike. Consider that the German style of writing the digit seven (or also the letter Z) involves a crossbar:
Eight and three are another famous pair.
Ironically, in recent history, it seems that a larger forging issue German authorities have been wrestling with was altering car licence plates, so back in nineties, the German government commissioned some work to develop a new font, the Fälschungserschwerende Schrift or FE Schrift, that made a point of having no two letters or digits closely resemble each other, and it's now in wide use. To me, it looks a little bit weird, but I do appreciate the egg-shaped letter O. 🐣
I look at this, and see some slight similarities to the typefaces that say that they are meant to help against dyslexia. I wonder if this would actually be the case.
@futurebird: As for whether such forgery is a real thing — well, I haven't seen the kind of forgery that these practices would prevent myself, probably partly because they have been quite effective at preventing it, but I do remember a case of fraud in which a person executed a wire transfer order by filling out an order form, by hand, to something like "seventy pounds", made a point to write it clumsily enough for the gap to have plenty of space for future alterations, and once the teller had signed and stamped his order, modified it to say "seventy thousand pounds", and faxed the bogus order to a furniture vendor. The vendor even made a point to call _thee bank to ask if the payment had been made, got the response of "Yes, an order of seventy came in yesterday", and assumed that everything was in order, so the fraudster made away with seventy thousand dollars of office furniture.
That happened back in the mid-nineties, when signing and stamping hand-written orders was still a thing, though. In the modern world, the first line of defence against this is, tellers don't sign and stamp customer-submitted forms, they take their nice computers and print out their own documents saying whatever it is that needs a receipt, and sign and stamp that.
@futurebird: Long, long ago, when writing was still something done by hand, there was concern that forgers might alter important numbers on important documents, and in many European bureaucratic traditions, the way to manage such a concern was adopting a practice whereby important numbers, most commonly monetary sums, would be written in both numbers and also spelt out as words. In forms, it's also customary to explicitly cross out the unused part of the gap, or if the form has a list, to make a big 'z' mark over the unused rows of the list, so as to reduce the risk of somebody adding to the end of the gap later, or filling in more rows. The practice of always writing out the currency sub-units, such as "12.00€ / twelve euros and no cents", not just "12.00€ / twelve euros" is also related: it reduces the risk of somebody adding to the field later.
It doesn't make quite as much sense for the number of random letters, but I guess somebody found it a hard habit to get rid of, and it's not like it hurts anybody.
I have a bunch of phrases that I like to use to quietly indicate "this is really fucking stupid" in a way that really fucking stupid people don't notice.
Things like "may or may not be", "one (1) items" (the plural is deliberate there), "utilize" and "enhances synergy".
A lot of people like to fluff to seem smarter, or in hopes of being somehow less liable in case things go wrong.
They waste my time, I mock them. Equilibrium is achieved.
@justafrog@futurebird I am also bothered by the gratuitous overuse of "utilize". It is almost always better to use "use".
Some will say that these words don't have exactly the same meaning. "Use" means what you think it does, but "utilize" suggests that you're making something useful in a way that it wasn't previously, e.g., "He utilized his credit card as a spatula."
@dmself@futurebird I use a password manager that for some reason chose a font where these symbols (and possibly the vertical pipe |) are identical.
In related news, this is why I tell my computer science students not to use a lower-case L (l) as a variable name. I was shocked when I ran across an introductory machine learning book that, in the first chapter, had not one (1) but five (5) variables with this name -- they differed only in font!
@dmself: And just to think, it was not so long ago that typewriters that didn't even have digits 0 or 1, because one was supposed to type the uppercase O or lowercase l instead, were in wide use.
@riley@dmself@futurebird Brings back memories. I learned to type on such a typewriter many years ago. My dad would hammer out letters at the weekend on it.
@futurebird lawyer here…it is convention and solely for the purpose of clarity. You don’t have to do it obvs (I.e. your brief would not be rejected for failing to follow this convention, etc.) you simply do it because it protects you and your client as it makes the number you’re using crystal clear.
@futurebird I think it’s a convention, a standard but not a rule. But, visually, if you are scanning a document, it’s easier to pick out than the name of a number.
@futurebird My legal writing professor actually told us not to do this (graduated in 2020), but people out here in the world seem to do it regularly, so it may be a vestigial thing that's in the process of going away. I hate it, personally.
@jdst258: It's not very useful for computer-typeset documents. In some jurisdictions, there's still laws on the book requiring monetary amounts spelled out on some documents in some contexts. When I was in consulting, I'd spell the final sum of an invoice out in words; ostensibly, because there are (or at least were) countries in Europe where this was a required element of invoices, but it could also be because the accountant who I ran into who complained about this being missing was just used to the words being there. I don't think I've ever spelled numbers out when writing contracts or memorandums of understanding or specification work, though, only invoices and order confirmations (which are very closely related to invoices, anyway).
@futurebird Not a lawyer, but think you're right about it being to make it harder to manipulate.
E.g. it's common in other contexts where protecting against manipulation is important as well, such as cheques, where you many places not just write out the amount with words as well as numbers, but often also append "only" and sometimes draw a line through the rest of the amount field to make it hard to amend.
@futurebird protection against typos, in case the written and the numerically displayed number don't match then it can be queried? Honestly these days I suspect it's just convention, like barristers' wigs and gowns.
Add comment