So they’ve discovered literary form and genre. Remarkable.
To be less snarky, my wife is a lawyer, while I am an Anglican priest (cue the jokes). Both of us are in fields where certain traditional literary forms—be it statutes, contracts, biblical texts, or liturgical prayers—play important roles. These forms tend to be inherently conservative because there is the sense among practitioners of both the law and the liturgy that things can go awry if one departs too far from established conventions, so it’s better to rely upon boilerplate conventions, which can actually be more efficient in spite of their syntactical convolutions. Indeed, C.S. Lewis makes the point w/r/t liturgical vs. extemporaneous prayer that formal, customary prayer frees one up actually to pray because one isn’t having to decide with every utterance whether or not one agrees. The extemporaneous prayer may be more “straightforward,” but it imposes its own set of cognitive burdens.
I would guess that legal writing operates similarly: boilerplate constructions have generally standard and agreed-upon meanings around which many of the substantive interpretive issues have already been resolved, which makes them on the whole more efficient. What law seeks to accomplish as a genre of writing depends upon striking a difficult balance among interpretive stability, capaciousness, and definitiveness, which necessitates certain concessions to what we might consider stylistic infelicity. (Plus, those concessions keep food on my table, so I’m rather grateful for them, lol.)
It shouldn’t be surprising or noteworthy that people who are asked to compose a bit of text in a particular genre respond by writing in a way that conforms to what they understand of its generic conventions. Similarly, if I asked people to write something that could be a passage from the Gospels, most people would probably produce a text with thees, thous, and verilys and that would also likely include something about sheep and being good to other people. They would do this because in their minds that is what “the Bible” ought to sound like. Likewise, if I asked you to compose thirty seconds of ad copy for a new car, you probably aren’t going to write it in the form of an epic prologue (“Ford and the man I sing…”).
We all have baseline understandings and expectations of what conventional forms look like and sound like, which are often tied to what the particular form is trying to convey or accomplish. So, perhaps legalese is a form of “incantation” trying to conjure up its own authority, but arguably so is every other literary form. That’s just how form works: if it doesn’t establish some implicit authority (even in the most rudimentary sense of “you should pay attention to this”), it’s effectively meaningless.
Further affiant sayeth naught.