Large Solar Projects and Lawyers
Wow. I thought I was willing to take a stance that I know is bound to irritate certain people. A guy here at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum just put me to shame; he told a room filled with dozens of lawyers — at a conference sponsored by their firms, some of the largest on Earth:
The real problem with the solar market is that lawyers go out of their way to write documents that are deliberately ambiguous, just so they’ll have the opportunity to argue about it. We don’t have business negotiations any more; we bicker over legal language that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
I’m sure there’s more than a little merit to what he said, but you could have heard a pin drop.
I don’t know from experience how ambiguous language relates to solar power. However, I have and experience with legal documents which are inordinately long and much more difficult to read than they would be if they had been well-written. Also, we can do without the following terms: party of the first part, party of the second part, appertaining thereto, hereinafter known as, etc etc.
The purpose of writing should be to convey information accurately. Moreover, good writers make a real effort to write documents which are easily read and understood. By that definition, many lawyers are horrible writers. When a legal document is poorly written, lawyers should be directed to rewrite it at no additional charge.
There are objective ways to measure the readability of a document. A quick way, although it is not entirely sufficient, is to determine the average number of words in a sentence since excessively long sentences are more difficult to read and may have to be reread several times before they are understood.
Error correction:
The second sentence should begin, “However, I have had …”
It’s too bad that there isn’t an edit function.
Thats awesome! alot of popele have all kinds of panels and a huge battery bank then they have hooked to a lap top and a boom box! I am happy to hear your use of the system useful stuff!
In former times, legal and medical documents were written in Latin – a language unknown to nearly all commoners. This was no more an accident than modern textual embroidery.