Last week the global law firm DLA Piper announced more redundancies; or, as the firm's chief operating officer Bob Bratt put it, more "right-sizing". It was a reminder that in spite of the economic crisis – and its discrediting effect on all things emanating from the financial sector – law firms' love affair with corporate jargon continues unabashed.

Not that this should come as much of a surprise. As evidenced by their penchant for Latin legal maxims and expressions normally found only in 18th-century period dramas, lawyers love impenetrable language. They were always going to be susceptible to the charms of corporatespeak – and stay loyal even when it threatens to go out of fashion.

Still, sometimes it gets a bit much. Bratt's talk of "right-sizing" brought back memories of a conversation I had with a senior in-house lawyer at a multinational company a few months ago about legal outsourcing. Anxious about the potentially negative connotations associated with the term, the lawyer suggested we say "right-sourcing" instead, adding by way of explanation: "Because ultimately outsourcing is all about finding the right solution."

Happily, most lawyers' innate conservatism prevents them from indulging in jargon at this extreme end of the spectrum. Instead they prefer milder reality-skewing terms like "risk management" (gambling), "adding value" (giving things away for free) and taking a "solution-focused approach" (cutting corners) – all of which became staples of the corporate legal lexicon during the economic expansion that took place between 2001-2007, a period when lawyers engaged more unconditionally than ever with the values of their corporate clients.

More recently we've seen the emergence of "going forward", the recession-era phrase of choice for prefacing sentences about an uncertain future in a way that implies the speaker is in total control of events. Lawyers – who clients often refer to as being "paid to worry" – have taken to the term enthusiastically.

At least the above expressions are rooted in logic – albeit the rather perverse logic of trying to make bad things sound good. Other jargon popular among corporate lawyers just seems senseless. Take away the capacity of "synergy", "roundtable" and "roll-out" to grant speakers momentary respite from the corporate world by evoking happier thoughts of Star Trek/medieval knights/carpets, and what's left? Similarly, what's the point in tearing up the grammatical rulebook to employ "spend" as a noun, and "team" and "action" as verbs?

The general breakdown of meaning is compounded by the mantra-like intensity with which corporate jargon is often used. During a speech by the managing partner of a leading City law firm at a press event over the summer, my fellow journalists and I counted 11 "going forwards" in five minutes. Amazingly, this level of repetition was trumped at a recent conference I attended, where a group of lawyers' passion for the term "added value" was such that at one point of anti-intellectual crescendo it almost became a chant. Judging by the looks on their faces, I think a few of them may have even reached some sort of corporate nirvana.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

But even the author of 1984 never managed to come up with an expression as crazy as "right-sizing".

Alex Aldridge is contributing editor of Legal Week