Lawyers and nonlawyers alike prefer contracts written in plain English
Reading through legal documents can be a real slog. Who, after all, knows the meaning of “ex curia” or “de jure” without going to law school? Whose head doesn’t spin at words such as “hereinafter” or at endless sentences with hypercomplex grammar?
Lawyers won’t often admit a preference for plain language, says the study’s lead author Eric Martínez, a licensed attorney and doctoral student studying cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You hear lawyers complain about bad writing by other lawyers,” he says, “but it wasn’t as obvious to me that lawyers struggle to read these documents themselves.”
This tradition is deeply rooted and can’t be changed overnight. Contract attorneys largely rely on preexisting templates, which save time and money and are seen as less risky. “There’s this tendency to copy and paste,” Martínez says. And this reliance on lawyer speak starts early in an attorney’s education. “From day one [of law school], it seemed like people were already talking in this interesting, lawyerly way,” he says.
Lawyers and laypeople alike have been railing against legalese for dozens—if not hundreds—of years. The “plain-language movement” ramped up around 1972, when President Richard Nixon decreed that the Federal Register’s government rules and notices be written in “layman’s terms.
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