What I hope to deliver is an object lesson. Urnie the atturney's notice provision was, for its time and place, a solid piece of drafting. But Urnie retired to the Sun Belt many years ago. Like Urnie, we shall always draft provisions based on the world we know. We can draft flexibly, and we can provide some leeway for technical and social change, but we are likely to be wrong in much of our thinking about the future.
Legal boilerplate is neither mumbo-jumbo nor holy writ.
It represents, for the most part, a draftsman's reasonable attempt to deal with features of a legal, business, social and technological environment. As that environment changes, well-drafted provisions can become unsuitable. Unfortunately, the ancient provisions don't come with commentary. An associate plodding through the firm's form file is unlikely to know what assumptions underlay the provisions. Perhaps an obscure phrase is there to deal with a legal problem that remains formidable.