Challenge: rewrite your worst clause

Every lawyer has a clause they are not proud of. The one copied from an old template, stretched with every negotiation, that nobody dares to touch any more. Maybe it works. But nobody except its author understands it on first reading.

Here is a challenge.

The rules

Take a real clause from your contracts, privacy notices or terms and conditions. Anonymise it. Rewrite it with three constraints:

1. 60 words at most;
2. someone with no legal training must be able to explain it in their own words after a single read;
3. the legal effect must not change.

Email me both the original and the rewrite at marco@giacomello.digital. I will pick the most effective rewrites and discuss them here, with the authors' permission, together with what we learn about what makes a text hard.

Why it is worth it

This is not a style exercise. European law already asks for it: the Unfair Terms Directive requires terms drafted in plain, intelligible language, and the GDPR requires clear and plain language. In practice, though, almost nobody checks whether the result is actually understandable.

That is the question behind È CHIARO?: helping writers see the text through the reader's eyes. But the tool matters less than the habit. Rewriting a clause briefly and clearly forces you to decide what you really mean. Often you find that the long version was hiding a doubt, not a safeguard.

A practical rule I use: if I have to rephrase a clause to explain it to a client, the rephrased version belongs in the contract.