Financial Definition of Boilerplate

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Boilerplate in Historical Law

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What does Boilerplate mean in American Law?

The definition of Boilerplate in the law of the United States, as defined by the lexicographer Arthur Leff in his legal dictionary is:

The common name of those solid blocks of language used in legal documents of all kinds to do standardized law jobs. Common examples include the executor-powers provisions in wills, act-of-God paragraphs in contracts, and disclaimer-of-warranty terms in consumer-sales slips. But boilerplate can show up almost anyplace.

Its value is obvious: it is to legal practice what ready-made garments are to the clothing industry and standardized parts are to building and manufacturing. Customizing any product is expensive, and to the extent that one can get essentially the same result with a standardized element of production there is a true gain in efficiency, i.e., you can produce and sell the same product for less. Moreover, it is frequently the case that the safety and utility of something, including a block of language, can be established only through wide use; if it holds up, “works,” over a long period in divers contexts, it acquires an attractive solidity in which one can gratefully repose trust.

Moreover, the safety and workability of boilerplate provisions is often overstated. A block provision may be used hundreds of times without causing trouble only because that kind of trouble only rarely arises, e.g., one”s act-of-God provision may in fact be terrible for coping with assigning losses due to piracy, but one won”t find that out until a corsair strikes-when it”s too late to redraft.

All of this is not to say that boilerplate should not be used. Legal service at reasonable cost is impossible without it. But recent developments in the general technology of word reproduction makes cautionary advice more pressing. It used to be that boilerplate, whether changed or not between uses, had to be physically redone for each use. The four or so pages of executor powers had to be retyped into each new will. Thus, tinkering by the lawyer prior to any use would cost him extra time, but not his typist. But now with word processing machines capable of exactly reproducing pages of materials without even secretarial intervention, any change will interrupt what would otherwise be an almost cost free routine. So the temptation to act as if boilerplate is off limits to lawyerly consideration will be even more intensified. As noted above, that would be costly in many other ways.

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