meaning of drafting

Drafting may be defined as the synthesis of law and fact in a language form [Stanley Robinson: Drafting Its Application to Conveyancing and Commercial Documents (1980); (Butterworths); Chapter 1, p.3]. This is the essence of the process of drafting. All three characteristics rank equally in importance. In other words, legal drafting is the crystallization and expression in definitive form of a legal right, privilege, function, duty, or status.

**MEANING OF DRAFTING** Drafting may be defined as the synthesis of law and fact in a language form [Stanley Robinson: Drafting Its Application to Conveyancing and Commercial Documents (1980); (Butterworths); Chapter 1, p.3]. This is the essence of the process of drafting. All three characteristics rank equally in importance. In other words, legal drafting is the crystallization and expression in definitive form of a legal right, privilege, function, duty, or status. It is the development and preparation of legal instruments such as constitutions, statutes, regulations, ordinances, contracts, wills, conveyances, indentures, trusts and leases, etc. The process of drafting operates in two planes: the conceptual and the verbal. Besides seeking the right words, the draftsman seeks the right concepts. Drafting, therefore, is first thinking and second composing. Drafting, in legal sense, means an act of preparing the legal documents like agreements, contracts, deeds etc. A proper understanding of drafting cannot be realised unless the nexus between the law, the facts, and the language is fully understood and accepted. Drafting of legal documents requires, as a pre-requisite, the skills of a draftsman, the knowledge of facts and law so as to put facts in a systematised sequence to give a correct presentation of legal status, privileges, rights and duties of the parties, and obligations arising out of mutual understanding or prevalent customs or usages or social norms or business conventions, as the case may be, terms and conditions, breaches and remedies etc. in a self-contained and self-explanatory form without any patent or latent ambiguity or doubtful connotation. To collect, consolidate and co-ordinate the above facts in the form of a document, it requires serious thinking followed by prompt action to reduce the available information into writing with a legal meaning, open for judicial interpretation to derive the same sense and intentions of the parties with which and for which it has been prepared, adopted and signed. Thanks