A bit of legal wording help - any lawyers/accountants?

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jtaylor
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A bit of legal wording help - any lawyers/accountants?

Post by jtaylor »

I'm trying to understand and work through a will which included the creation of a trust for a property.
There's some legal wording which is very confusing.
In addition to all other power conferred by law my Trustees may at any time and from time to time and in their unfettered discretion raise the whole or any part of the vested contingent expectant or presumptive share or shares of any beneficiary hereunder and pay the same to or apply the same for the benefit of such beneficiary.
I've got my theory of what it means, but any lawyers out there who could translate into plain English?
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Mrs C.
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Post by Mrs C. »

Why can`t legal things be written in plain English in the first place?? Or is it so you have to pay someone to "translate" them for you?
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Post by Vonny »

Would be hard enough to decipher if sober but after a couple all I can say is :shock:
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sejintenej
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Post by sejintenej »

Mrs C. wrote:Why can`t legal things be written in plain English in the first place?? Or is it so you have to pay someone to "translate" them for you?
There is currently (well, it's 10 years old) a campaign for plain English within the legal profession and one is seeing a definite improvement. (As an example, one industry standard 30 plus line single sentence has been cut to about 15 words.)

I think that the worst I ever came across was a 5 line clause in a contract relating to the Forties Oil Field in the North Sea. It took me all Saturday and most of Sunday to work out the meaning and all the ramifications of that one clause.

The problem is that the wording must be incapable of any alternative meaning or interpretation. We once had a Spanish school teacher staying with us to learn English; the school gave her a simple sentence in English with the task of working out as many meanings as possible. From say 15 words we got nearly that many meanings which illustrates the difficulty of concise construction.

On top of that the entire agreement must be totally complete (though English law can excuse a few omissions in certain situations). As a result my basic agreement for one type of transaction ran to 57 sides of A4 paper, Arial 12.

Oh, and yes, lawyers do make a good living out of mumbo jumbo! One friend from the trade has 6 foreign holidays a year - this year it has been Alaska, Venezuela, I think Cuba and I don't know where so far.
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Post by J.R. »

If you get really stuck, Julian, let me know ! An occasional drinking partner has recently retired as the senior legal exec for the Metropolitan Police. His legal knowledge seems to have no bounds !
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Post by jtaylor »

sejintenej has been extremely helpful via PM - so a big thank you to David for his time on this one.

Looks like it means what I thought, which is that as long as well agree we can do what I was thinking, so that's good.

J
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