Lessons from Dan Brown

I admit it. I am not proud of this, but I bought the new Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol yesterday. The very day it was released. To make my shame even more acute, I finished it about 6 hours. It is the latest book to feature Robert Langdon, the character that made Dan Brown a zillionaire. Langdon is a symbologist who follows trails of symbolic and metaphorical clues, thus saving the Vatican from an antimatter explosion, or finding the Holy Grail.

I make my confession shamefully because I am well aware that his books are page-turning mind candy. The Da Vinci Code was so bad that even as I obsessively turned page after page, I found myself thinking that it was the worst book ever written. This new book is actually quite good, and like all Dan Brown novels – even the bad ones (perhaps especially the bad ones) – it left me to ponder big, philosophical questions.

So what does this have to do with legal writing?

One of the recurring themes in the three Robert Langdon books is that words are often imprecise. They can have multiple meanings. Think of The Da Vinci Code, which by now everyone has read (or at least seen the movie), and how the clues depended on the multiplicity of meaning:

In London lies a knight a Pope interred.
His labor’s fruit a Holy wrath incurred.
You seek the orb that ought be on his tomb.
It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb.

If you remember, the poem led Langdon and Sophie to the Temple Church because the Knights Templar built it and several are buried there. Other misleading words in this little quatrain include the reference to “Rosy flesh and seeded womb,” all believed to be associated with the Grail myth.

Of course the Temple Church was a red herring – the knight was Sir Isaac Newton, not a medieval Crusader, the Pope in question was not the Bishop of Rome (the Pope’s official title, BTW), but rather Alexander Pope. The orb of Rosy flesh and seeded womb – an apple, the inspiration for his work on gravity.

While ambiguity and wordplay has its place in fiction, it has no place in legal writing. Lawyers spend thousands upon thousands of hours each year trying to divine the precise meaning of poorly chosen imprecise words. As any transactional lawyer can tell you, the meaning of a particular word can have consequences with several zeroes.

It is the lawyerly quest for precision that probably caused us to start using those familiar doublets and triplets – “cease and desist;” “aid and abet;” “him, his heirs, and assigns” – in the first place. Rather than add extra words to cover all possibilities, let’s just choose the right word. “Stop” is simpler and, frankly, sterner than “cease and desist.”

Effective legal representation depends on clarity. That begins with word choice. Your reader – whether it’s a court, a client, or an opponent – should not have to go on a Grail Quest to get your point.