Regarding the lawyer: Perhaps I have a wrong idea both about the legal nature of the document and about what a lawyer does. But yes, in my imagination a lawyer is able to advise you on how to formulate a policy clearly and remove vagueness. So I might go to the lawyer and ask: ‘If this were to be legally binding, how would we have to write it?’
My imagination might be wrong, though – I haven’t dealt with lawyers much.
My model suggests that a lawyer would say: “Very little of this is legally enforceable, I could help you write something legally enforceable, but it would be a much smaller subset of this document, and I don’t know how to help with the rest”.
Would be curious if people disagree. I also don’t have a ton of experience in dealing with lawyers.
Fwiw, I think you’re both right here. If you were to hire a reasonably good lawyer to help with this, I suspect the default is they’d say what Habryka suggests. That said, I also do think that lawyers are trained to do things like remove vagueness from policies.
Basically, I don’t think it’d be useful to hire a lawyer in their capacity as a lawyer. But, to the extent there happen to be lawyers among the people you’d consider asking for advice anyway, I’d expect them to be disproportionately good at this kind of thing.
[Source: I went to two years of law school but haven’t worked much with lawyers on this type of thing.]
Regarding the lawyer: Perhaps I have a wrong idea both about the legal nature of the document and about what a lawyer does. But yes, in my imagination a lawyer is able to advise you on how to formulate a policy clearly and remove vagueness. So I might go to the lawyer and ask: ‘If this were to be legally binding, how would we have to write it?’
My imagination might be wrong, though – I haven’t dealt with lawyers much.
My model suggests that a lawyer would say: “Very little of this is legally enforceable, I could help you write something legally enforceable, but it would be a much smaller subset of this document, and I don’t know how to help with the rest”.
Would be curious if people disagree. I also don’t have a ton of experience in dealing with lawyers.
Fwiw, I think you’re both right here. If you were to hire a reasonably good lawyer to help with this, I suspect the default is they’d say what Habryka suggests. That said, I also do think that lawyers are trained to do things like remove vagueness from policies.
Basically, I don’t think it’d be useful to hire a lawyer in their capacity as a lawyer. But, to the extent there happen to be lawyers among the people you’d consider asking for advice anyway, I’d expect them to be disproportionately good at this kind of thing.
[Source: I went to two years of law school but haven’t worked much with lawyers on this type of thing.]