​The GCSE results came out in England this week. When I took what was then the O Level equivalent I had to take an extra subject because I wanted to study law – Latin.
 
Fortunately this is no longer a requirement, though I did discover that in the study and practice of the law Latin phrases with a specific legal meaning were quite often used. Lawyers commonly referred in client communications to things like:
 
 “obiter dicta” (literally translated as “something said in passing” but in the legal world that part of a judgement which is not essential to the decision and therefore not legally binding as a precedent); or
 
“res ipsa loquitor” (literally “the thing speaks for itself” but more grandly taken to mean that mere occurrence can imply negligence).
 
But how is this going to help a client understand as opposed to maybe seeking to impress them with the esoteric knowledge of the professional?
 
This is typified by the phrase “lorem ipsum dolor” which I saw as the title of a legal newsletter this week. Looks pretty impressive doesn’t it – those lawyers have got to be good haven’t they?
 
In fact the phrase is a classic example of meaningless jargon. It does not actually mean anything at all in Latin, though it is attributed in part to a passage by Cicero. Instead it is a term used to make the reader concentrate on and check layout and font, not the meaning of the words. It has been used for this purpose for four centuries.
 
And this is the danger of jargon. It doesn’t actually mean anything or possibly the wrong thing and in any event is not understood by the recipient, even ironically if they are a Latin scholar.
 
The writer Ben Aaronovitch once said “There's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you're making it up as you go along.”
 
And it’s not just lawyers who are prone to the risks of jargon. I found this article The Dangers Of Hidden Jargon In Communicating Science which concludes that:
 
When technical definitions hide behind words we use in everyday speech, the opportunities for miscommunication abound. The expert thinks she has been clear; the recipient thinks he has understood. And yet, both could be wrong.
 
As Kingsman Brewster a distinguished educator and American diplomat said: Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession.
 
Maybe as we professionals come under challenge from artificial intelligence and robotic technology we should heed the lesson and cut out jargon, Latin or otherwise. You can be pretty sure that the robot lawyers of the future which evolve from IBM’s Watson will not be using gratuitous Latin phrases.

Some years ago when I took over as the chair of the Society for Computers and Law (SCL) – an organisation I thoroughly recommend if you are interested in the law and IT – we debated our purpose and raison d’etre. We needed some frame of reference to determine the organisation’s priorities.
 
We concluded that we were above all a community for professionals interested in IT and the law and this realisation informed how we could take the society forward. By community what we had in mind was very much the traditional definition of the word:
 
The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common (the English Oxford Living Dictionary).
 
The absence of any sense of community in an organisation or team within it is I suggest potentially very damaging and potentially destructive, even to professional people like lawyers and doctors who it could be argued have to work alone to some extent. However, I think that we all still need contact with our colleagues and the opportunity to both collaborate with peers and in turn to educate and learn from others.
 
A Harvard Business Review article suggests we need a community more than a network:
 
The internet is great for spreading information and rallying crowds, but you can’t mobilize people to collaborate and create something of lasting value simply by connecting them via the web. To get serious results from a network, you need commitment and a continuity of relationships among the participants.
 
These days creating a sense of community in a remotely networked world with homeworking and Skype may be challenging but it is essential for a sense of common purpose and just general well-being.
 
And this is not just about professional teams or societies. See, for example, this article entitled A fundamental human need for community may be the next big opportunity for marketers in which Adam Bain the chief operating officer of Twitter is quoted as saying: “the audience isn’t just connected to devices, but to each other,”.
 
As the English poet John Donne writes so eloquently:
 
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
​

I read an article in the Times this week about a Harvard Business School study ( Want to Be More Productive? Sit Next to Someone Who Is) which has determined that placing workers in an office next to colleagues who are extremely good at their job raises the standard of the co-located workers – and vice versa.
 
I am sure this is right and recall how trainees placed with good mentoring partners in law firms flourished whilst those with less committed principals (one even through a very heavy law book at his trainee) tended to regress.
 
Anybody who has managed a youth soccer team will know that skilful players with a good attitude tend to lift the standard of the whole team. Selfish or uncommitted players have the opposite effect.
 
However offices may be becoming a thing of the past – see this article, also by Harvard Business School, Will the Gig Economy make the Office Obsolete?
 
The gig economy, where independent consultants, contractors, and freelancers create portfolios of work in lieu of one full-time job, is transforming the way we work by disconnecting work from an office.
 
So how in an environment where people work from home or on trains or at client’s offices and see their colleagues far less frequently can good behaviour even be recognised yet alone spread contagiously?
 
The answer seems to be to use all of the tools and opportunities of the virtual world to re-create the same sense of team and closeness and ability to learn from one another as exists in a traditional office. Just because teams are not physically located in the same place does not mean that the dynamics identified by Harvard Business School in a physical environment cannot apply in a virtual one.
 
And indeed to complete a triumvirate of references to Harvard Business School, this this article Getting Virtual Teams Right addresses the question So how do you create and lead an effective virtual team?
 
Francois de la Rochefoucauld a seventeenth century French author of summed up this concept of learning by example quite well:
 
“Nothing is so contagious as example; and we never do any great good or evil which does not produce its like.”

​I am willing to bet that those of you who are say under 30 will immediately understand that ROTFL means in text speak “Roll on the Floor Laughing”. It’s like LOL “Laugh out Loud”. Others like me perhaps a bit less familiar with the use of these terms may struggle to understand straight away.
 
"Texting language" means the abbreviations and slang commonly used with mobile phone text messaging, or other Internet-based communication such as email. Here is a site with a comprehensive list of these acronyms for those less familiar with them.
 
In texting as in anything else misunderstandings can be unfortunate and illustrate the importance of exact understanding. If a friend texts asking for support in a time of personal crisis and you text back LOL thinking it means Lots of Love, you will not be popular.
 
The same is equally true but more so in contracts. TLA’s (that’s Three Letter Acronym’s) are often used with abandon in many IT agreements and in their negotiation. Discussing the technical schedules is like being in a club with its own language. And yet often the acronyms can be wrong or at least capable of being misunderstood or interpreted in different ways. It pays to put a glossary of acronyms to avoid this.
 
And even then the actual meaning has to be exact and understood. It’s like using the term “response time” to measure computer performance. The contract says the response time for a computer system to carry out a task must be say three seconds. But does that mean the time for a signal to go from one computer to another to commence the task? Or is it the time to complete the task. Here is a more complete definition:
 
The elapsed time between the end of an inquiry or demand on a computer system and the beginning of a response; for example, the length of the time between an indication of the end of an inquiry and the display of the first character of the response at a user terminal.
 
All of this is why in say an outsourcing contract defining and capturing the meaning of key terms – and then using them in the agreement is essential - even though it can be a meticulous and time-consuming task.
 
As Socrates said some two thousand five hundred years ago: “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”