Lawyer and law professor here: No, no, NO!
Wall-of-words text is a sign of a L.O.A.D. — a Lazy Or Arrogant Drafter.
I teach contract drafting to 3Ls and stress The Two Great Rules of Readability:
1. SSSSP: Short, Simple, Single-Subject Paragraphs. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
2. BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
Of of my ex-bosses preferred long, well-written emails to just about any other form of communication. He was a really bright guy with a degree in English Literature that somehow stumbled his way into the software industry. When he wanted to start working with a new technology, he'd ingest a small pile of driest textbooks on the subject over the course of a week or so, understand and retain all of it, then start running laps around the folks who had been working with the tech for years. He's still the only engineer I've ever met that preferred learning-by-reading over learning-by-doing.
Definitely agree with your approach to drafting, but I think you could be overreacting a bit here. Even the shortest contracts might seem like a "wall of text" to the lay person, and short paragraphs stringed together is a wall of text.
At any rate the preferred format in most legal contexts is still "`wall' of text" (whether big or small wall, as opposed to diagrams, spreadsheets, or conversations), which is what I think was the original point.
"White space is your friend" is another rule I preach to my students. Some 40 years of dealing with contracts has persuaded me that short paragraphs with white space in between them are FAR easier to review and negotiate — which means they get signed sooner, and clients vastly prefer that.
> as opposed to diagrams, spreadsheets, or conversations
For several years there have been people banging the drum for contracts to include more icons, flow charts, etc., for improved readability. So far, that idea hasn't gotten a lot of traction — IMHO that's because most lawyers barely even know how to use Microsoft Word competently and would have no idea how to create a flow chart or meaningful icon, so they default to writing pure text (which is also the quickest and thus cheapest path to getting a draft onto someone else's desk).
About the best I've been able to come up with in this regard, as something that can be done with Word, is to create tables of, e.g., action items, with columns such as "Event | Action | Who | When" — basically, an Intel-style "AR list" [0], or in software, a CASE statement.
[0] http://www.nathanzeldes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Effec...
There's too much info on the internet, and even in internal documentation: if I have to read half the thing to understand if it's relevant, I'm gonna spend most of my time on irrelevant stuff.
This is a problem with asking engineers to document without having a writing culture. I've seen it happen: once it's written down, that's it: it's documented, great work! But we should treat it more like code, with clear divisions of concern s, scopes and even refactors when needed!
I totally get the walls of text are needed to a point, and we don't have good options to produce succint contracts. It just feels like an everybody lose situation.
You're too kind — literally.
Wall-of-words text is never needed in a contract. Clients should demand that lawyers do a better job in drafting readable contracts — because readable contracts get signed sooner, thus taking up less of the business people's time to negotiate and freeing them up to focus on other things (not to mention being less costly).
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The Two Great Rules of Readability above will get you at least 95% of the way there.
Wall-of-words contract language is analogous to spaghetti code in a computer program.