Practice Development

Law Firms Benefit from Plain Language

What is plain language?

Clearer, simpler writing -- stripped of complexity but not of style - is only one aspect of the process of plain language writing. Two other features of plain language process are also important to improving quality client relations:

• Understanding your clients' needs (through research and an assessment)
• Evaluating your service (in the form of documents)

The benefits of plain language

Confidence

Plain language inspires confidence. How?

The prerequisite to producing plain language is doing clear thinking. Garbled thinking = garbled language. Clients like to know what the documents say that you ask them to sign.

Clients can understand and act upon their rights and obligations when you advise them and give them documents in plain language. They make informed decisions and avoid legal complications. This inspires self-confidence and confidence in you.

A survey by the B.C. Plain Language Institute discovered that the more experience a person has with lawyers and legal documents the more likely that person is frustrated and angered by incomprehensible legal language.

The more often a person deals with a lawyer or reads legal documents, the higher that person's expectation that he or she will gain skill in deciphering legalese. Unfortunately, that doesn't usually happen.

So the clients lose confidence in the whole process, in the lawyer, and in their own ability to function effectively in legal situations. Using plain language for your clients' benefit reduces their frustration and increases their confidence and rapport with you.

Cost-efficiency
Plain language can make your practice more cost-efficient and clients appreciate your cost savings. Numerous examples of these cost-savings in business and government have been reported elsewhere.

• You save valuable time in teaching your articled students and editing or revising their drafting efforts.
• You save valuable time training legal assistants and other support staff.
• Staff are better able to understand and process clearer legal documents - whether they are proofreading or taking administrative steps on a file. These instils more confidence in them in their work and in the law firm. Such confidence can produce greater stability and less turn-over.
• You save time and money in computer conversions.
  With plain language, you can eliminate too many variables in a document package.
• You can simplify a document assembly by simplifying the documents themselves.
  Computerized plain-language precedent systems provide greater uniformity of service, confidence in the product and a greater sense of security in your office.

Advance planning
Preparing plain language documents now can be advance planning for coping with new legal requirements like the B.C. regulation requiring plain language auto leases or the Alberta Financial Consumers' Act. Having plain language policies and drafting practices in place can save you from panic later.

A new client service
The Australian law firm Philips Fox has a plain language department to provide business clients with a new legal service. They write clear legal documents for business -- like loan agreements, insurance policies and joint venture agreements.

Plain Language Department Head Christopher Balmford says plain language documents have value to clients because they increase efficiency, effectiveness, and sales, while they also improve business image and enhance customer relations.

For the law firm, the plain language practice has value because it

• raises the firm's profile in the market-place and attracted blue-chip clients
• gives the firm a feature that distinguishes it from its competitors and provides tangible benefits to its clients
• attracts new clients to the firm
• gives the firm a new cultural focus: meeting client needs
• adds to the firm's profits

Some reassurance
Garth Thornton, legislative counsel in New Zealand, discussed the demand for plain language in statute law at a past Commonwealth Law Conference. He said statutes in plain language won't eliminate the need for legal advice:

A major factor inhibiting easy understanding of the effect of a statute is that no law stands alone. A statute is a strand in a complex web. Every statute reaches out and interacts with other statutes and also the common law. A comprehensive understanding will depend on interpretation legislation, criminal practice, the law of evidence, concepts such as natural justice and remedies such as certiorari.

However plainly a statute or legal document is written, a person needs a lawyer to explain the effect of that document in their particular circumstances. Your income is not at risk from using plain language. But the quality of your service may be.

In closing, Tim Perrin, B.C. lawyer and author of Better Writing for Lawyers:

A reason to write well which should satisfy your senior partner is this:
"You'll be more convincing and win more cases in court. Your drafting will be tighter (and shorter) and actually more litigation proof. You'll make your clients happier, do a better job and -- as a side benefit -- make more money."