It was a tiny, inconsequential blip in the Bank of America Corporation legal saga. On October 13 the bank’s lawyers at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and staff lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission asked for court approval of a protective order. The seven-page, single-spaced request, which related to the bank’s decision to waive its attorney-client privilege, was drafted like the vast majority of legal documents. The prose meandered through mazes of clauses and subclauses until the gist of the matter was smothered. It was a mess, but as legal documents go, it was nothing unusual.
Still, Manhattan federal district court judge Jed Rakoff wasn’t going to let this gobbledygook pass through his chambers without comment. In a written order the next day, he scolded the lawyers and took the opportunity to school them in advocacy: “Although the text of the proposed Protective Order is draped in legalese–with the complete first sentence extending over two-and-a-quarter single-spaced pages and featuring no fewer than nine recitations of the ‘Whereas’–the thrust of the proposal is simple.” He then neatly summarized their request in one sentence, and granted the protective order.
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