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Even lawyers don’t like legalese
An interesting article about why legalese is written the way it is:
A new study shows lawyers find simplified legal documents easier to understand, more appealing, and just as enforceable as traditional contracts.
It’s no secret that legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, causing headaches for anyone who has had to apply for a mortgage or review any other kind of contract. A new MIT study reveals that the lawyers who produce these documents don’t like them very much either.
The researchers found that while lawyers can interpret and recall information from legal documents better than nonlawyers, it’s still easier for them to understand the same documents when translated into “plain English.” Lawyers also rated plain English contracts as higher-quality overall, more likely to be signed by a client, and equally enforceable as those written in “legalese.”
The findings suggest that while impenetrable styles of legal writing are well-entrenched, lawyers may be amenable to changing the way such documents are written.
“No matter how we asked the questions, the lawyers overwhelmingly always wanted plain English,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the study. “People blame lawyers, but I don’t think it’s their fault. They would like to change it, too.”
Eric Martínez, an MIT graduate student and licensed attorney, is the lead author of the new study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Frank Mollica, a former visiting researcher at MIT who is now a lecturer in computational cognitive science at the University of Edinburgh, is also an author of the paper [pnas.org].
[Source]: Massachusetts Institute of Technology [mit.edu]
[Also Covered By]: PHYS.ORG [phys.org]
