I Am Not a Lawyer

I am a big fan of legal documents that don’t read like legal documents. It saves everyone a lot of time and hassle if you can just say it in plain language. That said, however, “legalese” can be necessary. Like when you need to be specific enough to avoid liability. Like, say, when you’re writing an employee handbook for the major newspaper you have just bought. From the LA Times, reporting on itself (!):

San Francisco lawyer Mark Schickman applauded the Tribune handbook for eliminating legalese. “But in an effort to be brief and funny, they’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he said.Among its nine “core values,” the manual encourages employees to “Question authority and push back if you do not like the answer. You will earn respect, and not get into trouble for asking tough questions.”

To Schickman, who represents employers, that means if you try to terminate someone for being argumentative and insubordinate, the employee could argue that he or she was simply questioning authority and pushing back.

I’ve been in the workforce too long to think that anyone is going to actually try questioning authority and pushing back. In my experience, this earns you an invisible mark of Cain. However, you don’t need to have actually believed it in order to sue over it — you just need to be able to point to a rule that allows it.

It’s just an employee handbook, which in my experience means people will ignore it until it’s excuse-finding time. However, I’m interested to see whether it actually is cited in someone’s future lawsuit. There are legitimate gray areas there.

Kevin Roderick was nice enough to point out that the whole thing is available here in PDF form.