Customers want to know what the documents you have them sign actually say. They can understand their rights and obligations and act accordingly if they receive advice and documents in plain language. You can make informed decisions and avoid legal complications. It inspires self-confidence and self-confidence. In the private sector, plain language has saved many organizations time and money. In his book Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please: The Case for Plain Language in Business, Government, and Law, Joseph Kimble cites a number of them. For example, after simplifying billing in 2008, the Cleveland Clinic experienced a significant increase in payments to patients and was able to recover an additional $1 million per month. And after Sabre Travel implemented clearly written policies to help customers install its computerized flight information system, annual calls to Sabre`s help desk dropped by 70 percent, saving more than $2.4 million. But despite these successes, plain language has been slow to gain acceptance in the business world. The concept of contracts in plain language and their benefits are hard to deny.
Every company wants legal agreements that are easy to understand. Every company wants to spend less time negotiating and more time satisfying the customer. Every company wants to spend less time managing contracts and more time innovating. But change in any business is difficult, and radical change – which it is – is damn impossible. Creating a solid model for contracts in plain language takes time, consumes resources, and puts intellectual pressure on your organization given the habits that have developed over the years. Without a little old-fashioned courage and perseverance, your initiative in plain language will fail. As a first step, the legal team organized a multi-day off-site with the new plain text team – a group that included people from sales, technical and product support as well as the legal department. The objective was twofold: (1) to gain a thorough understanding of the services offered and (2) to identify their operational risks.
The legal team knew that assumptions were often made about what should be included in contracts without ever considering whether the services covered justified these passages. In order to avoid unnecessary text in the new contract, the Klartext team deliberately decided to postpone the development to another day. Using simple English doesn`t mean writing everything down in tabloid style. This means writing documents in a way that is appropriate for the public. If a law affects people (for example, a labor law that affects small businesses), those people should have a chance to understand it. The language used in a law should depend on the person affected by the law, taking into account their degree of familiarity with the subject. To say that it is impossible to create laws that everyone understands is no reason not to make them understandable to as many people as possible. Simple English is not mind-numbing. Nick Brodribb, Legal Counsel at Qantas Airways, commented: „Australian lawyers have long faced unclear and redundant language inserted into US legal contracts.
The pressure for plain English we`ve seen from GE and companies like Airbnb gives us a lot of hope for the future. Simple English should save time on the front-end of a transaction, allowing the company to get the project off to a fast start, manage it more easily, and potentially resolve disputes sooner. The Federal Judicial Centre has developed plain text versions of various types of class actions. The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws states: „The foundations of a good bill are accuracy, brevity, clarity and simplicity. Choose words that are clear and generally understandable. Use language that conveys the meaning you want to each reader. Leave out unnecessary words. Creating plain language documents is an upcoming plan for new legal requirements, such as consumer finance document laws. Simple language guidelines and design practices can keep you from rushing or panicking later.
It is also beneficial because: So the use of plain language is desirable, but how is it done? These seven steps are all you need to do to write effectively: Either way, this argument is based on the idea that the existing legal language is perfectly correct. If this were true, there would be much less need for lawyers to discuss conflicting interpretations of a law or document. Authors should aim for clarity and precision, rather than choosing between the two. Like a lot of legal language, it adds nothing but complexity. The purpose of plain language is to produce documents that truly represent a meeting of two parties to the dispute and are so easy to understand that they never need to be challenged in court. Too often, lawyers write for the Court of Appeal when they really only have to create a document that can be used and understood by some clients. Most legal disputes are settled amicably, so the few cases that go to court are supported by plain language. If the language is clear and the meaning clear to the general public, the judge will not intervene. Jargon is a barrier; This hinders the establishment of trust and wastes the reader`s time.
That`s why the U.S. government mandated the use of plain language in the 1970s — there`s even a website dedicated to the cause. Nevertheless, most companies do not follow the same guidelines. This myth has been challenged regularly and repeatedly. In the United States, 44 of the 50 states require insurance contracts to be written in plain English. Contrary to lawyers` expectations, there has never been a case where a contract has been declared less valid by writing it in plain language. Big changes start with small steps. You may not be able to eliminate legal language right away – and every lawyer knows that certain Latin expressions, such as a priori and de facto, are best suited to express certain ideas. That is why they are widely used outside the legal profession. I recommend starting with small steps and a pilot test group.
First, choose a document with relatively low impact or low risk, such as An Internal Memo and practice before-and-after scenarios with your team to differentiate between jargon-heavy writing and simple communication. Language outsourcing is not a new idea. This is a movement that began many years ago and, perhaps surprisingly, has made initial progress within the U.S. government. In 1972, President Nixon ordered that „secular terms“ be used in the Federal Register. Six years later, President Carter issued an executive order declaring that government regulations „should be as simple and clear as possible.“ The Clinton administration went a step further in 1998 by explicitly requiring federal agencies to use plain English.
