A lot of this is driven by inertia. When a lawyer goes to write a contract, she'll typically start with a prior contract or form agreement. This will either be

A lot of this is driven by inertia. When a lawyer goes to write a contract, she'll typically start with a prior contract or form agreement. This will either be used as a template, or large chunks will be borrowed and modified as needed. In either case, the lawyer is unlikely to reword a bunch of provisions in an attempt to improve readability. It's like the legal version of Chesterton's Fence — if you don't know why a particular clause is phrased a particular way, you leave it as-is. Your client/partner might ding you if you include a boilerplate provision you shouldn't have, but you'd probably get in more trouble if you affirmatively reworded something and broke a cross-reference or other logical linkage that was supposed to remain in place. As a result, language that was written a long time ago is still circulating in modern agreements. Note: I'm not defending any of this. As a lawer-turned-founder, I try to keep my agreements as short as possible!