White Space Is Your Friend

When editing a legal agreement, one of the easiest yet most useful tasks you can carry out is to create white space. You do this by taking long paragraphs containing one or more subclauses and breaking them into separate elements using the hard return (in other words, the “Enter” key).

An example may help. Here is a clause of the type that one might find in an asset or share purchase agreement:

This type of dense paragraph is, alas, far too common in legal agreements. Parsing such a clause is difficult even for those who draft these types of clauses for a living. Pity the poor client who tries to do so!

Now, simply by adding hard returns at the end of each sub-clause, we get this:

You will note several things. First and foremost, the readability of this text has improved, without having engaged in any copyediting of the actual text. Simply adding white space does not, of course, change the difficulty level of the text itself. (See this discussion of the need to focus on improving the readability of legal agreements.) It does, however, make it easier for the reader to see the relationships between, and therefore understand, each sub-element of the clause.

This approach also allows the drafter not only to ensure the proper grammar and syntax of the clause but also to verify that all necessary substantive issues have been addressed. In text-dense paragraphs, it is more likely that some key issue has been overlooked.

The drafter will also be able to copyedit the document more easily, because the text, which is now broken down into its component parts, is easier to grasp.

Remember that not all complex clauses have internal numbering. So you should be actively on the lookout for such clauses and create white space wherever you find them. Another example will serve here:

Use the same approach, even for such a seemingly straightforward clause:

This single action of adding white space will significantly improve your agreements.