When Legal Arguments Collapse Into 'That Would Be Absurd': Lessons for Contract Drafters

The Absurdity Argument as a Red Flag

In legal proceedings, the moment a party pivots from statutory text to arguing that the opposing interpretation would produce an "absurd" result, something instructive has happened. The party has run out of language to stand on. They are no longer arguing what the law says; they are arguing what they wish it meant, or what they insist it cannot mean, because the alternative is uncomfortable.

Recent filings in US federal courts have illustrated this dynamic with some clarity. Briefs that lean heavily on rhetorical appeals to absurdity, rather than on textual or precedential footing, expose a fundamental weakness: the underlying documents, statutes or agreements did not say what the drafter intended. That gap between intent and language is precisely where disputes are born and where enforcement becomes unpredictable.

For in-house counsel and law firms managing high-volume contract portfolios, this should prompt a straightforward question: how many of your standard agreements contain provisions that a court could characterise as absurd in application, because the drafting failed to anticipate the scenario now in dispute?

Ethics, Accountability and the Invisible Guardrails of Contracting

A separate thread running through recent legal commentary concerns professional responsibility. Over 500 former Department of Justice attorneys filed a brief affirming, as one passage put it, that they "never had issues serving the government ethically." The implication is that ethical frameworks are not obstacles to effective advocacy; they are load-bearing structures.

The same logic applies to commercial contracting. Governance frameworks, approval workflows, escalation thresholds and audit trails are not bureaucratic friction. They are the mechanisms that prevent an organisation from finding itself in a position where its own agreements cannot be defended on their merits.

When contracting processes lack accountability structures, the result tends to become visible only in litigation or regulatory review. By then, the cost of fixing it is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of building it correctly at the outset.

What Vague Drafting Looks Like in Practice

Consider the kinds of clauses that most frequently generate absurdity arguments in commercial disputes: limitation of liability caps drafted without carve-outs for wilful misconduct; force majeure provisions that list specific events but omit a general sweep-up clause; termination rights that specify notice periods but not the method of calculation; indemnity obligations that are mutual in form but asymmetric in effect due to defined-term inconsistencies.

None of these flaws are exotic. They appear routinely in agreements produced under time pressure, with insufficient review, or by teams who copy precedents without interrogating whether the language fits the commercial deal at hand. The drafter intended something sensible. The words produced something arguable. A court asked to resolve the dispute may ultimately reach a result that one side characterises as absurd, because the alternative reading is equally defensible on the text alone.

How AI-Assisted Drafting Addresses the Precision Problem

This is where purpose-built contract AI earns its keep, not by producing volume, but by producing precision. Adira drafts in a company's own established voice while reading agreements from that company's side of the transaction, which means it is calibrated to surface risk as a counterparty would exploit it, not merely as a drafter would intend it.

Critically, Adira incorporates jurisdiction-specific legal knowledge. An absurdity argument that might succeed before one court may fail entirely before another, depending on how that jurisdiction approaches statutory and contractual interpretation. Drafting tools that ignore jurisdictional variation produce agreements that are technically coherent in their home market but fragile elsewhere. For companies operating across multiple legal systems, that fragility accumulates silently until a dispute makes it visible.

The discipline of drafting with legal accuracy from the start reduces the probability that a counterparty or court will ever need to reach for an absurdity argument to make sense of your agreement.

The Practical Takeaway for In-House Teams

The lesson from watching litigants argue absurdity in high-stakes proceedings is not that courts are unpredictable, though they can be. The lesson is that legal arguments become untethered from text when the text was not written with sufficient care.

In-house teams should periodically audit their standard-form agreements against recent disputes in their sector, not to copy how others litigate, but to identify the categories of ambiguity that are currently generating litigation cost elsewhere. Where those categories overlap with your own precedents, the drafting needs revision.

Ethics and accountability structures, far from constraining effective contracting, are what make agreements defensible when tested. Building those structures into your CLM process, through proper approval workflows, jurisdiction-aware drafting and systematic review cycles, is the most straightforward way to ensure that your contracts never need an absurdity argument to survive scrutiny.