"[The tenant shall] when where and so often as occasion requires well and sufficiently ... repair renew rebuild uphold support sustain maintain pave purge scour cleanse glaze empty amend and keep the premises and every part thereof ... and all floors walls columns roofs canopies lifts and escalators ... shafts stairways fences pavements forecourts drains sewers ducts flues conduits wires cables gutters soil and other pipes tanks cisterns pumps and other water and sanitary apparatus thereon with all needful and necessary amendments whatsoever ...".

This is rampant verbosity, a verbosity which makes the clause far more difficult to read than its subject matter requires. Probably, the verbosity was prompted by a desire to be legally precise. If so, it failed, because the clause still ended up in court in a dispute over meaning. This demonstrates one of the great misconceptions of traditional legal drafting - that somehow a complex, traditional style is more precise than modern, plain language.

As you will know, this traditional style is not unique to English law and practice. It is found in all countries where English is the language of the law. One Australian lease which crossed my desk some time ago featured a tenant's repairing covenant - one single sentence - containing 424 words. If you looked hard you would find 2 commas, but no other punctuation. (Lack of punctuation is a hallmark of traditional legal drafting.) Lord Hoffmann once called this style of legal drafting "torrential". In leases it is nothing short of endemic. Commercial leases, in particular, commonly run to 50 or 60 pages, making them impossible for lay readers to comprehend and forcing lawyers to trawl through reams of turgid prose to advise clients about the obligations the documents contain.