Of course, the problem is not confined to leases. Mortgages are just as bad - perhaps worse. One of Australia's leading banks uses a standard mortgage which contains a sense-defying clause of 763 words; the clause contains 2 commas, 1 semi-colon, 3 sets of brackets, but no other punctuation.³ As if not to be outdone by this Australian leviathan, a New Zealand bank's standard guarantee form features an entirely punctuation-less sentence of 1299 words; and the same document has an average clause-length of 330 words. As the great English conveyancer, Davidson, once wrote: the legal profession prefers "to seek safety in verbosity rather than in discrimination of language". ⁴

To some, these drafting feats may evoke admiration: after all, it takes skill to write a grammatically-perfect sentence of 1299 words. But for most readers the drafting serves only to bewilder. Sometimes it bewilders even the drafters themselves. In a 1992 Australian case, a bank tried to enforce a guarantee which a customer had signed. One of the customer's defences was that certain clauses in the guarantee were meaningless. The guarantee form proved so tortuous that even the bank manager, when challenged in the witness box, had to admit that he could not understand some of the clauses; and it got worse - for, when challenged by the judge, nor could counsel for the bank.⁵