Plain Legal Language

The language of law is characterized by some features and peculiarities that make it difficult to understand for non-specialists in the field. The present article focuses on the need for plain legal language in order to guarantee observance of general principles of law, such as equality before the law and legal certainty. The first section deals with the historical and conceptual structure of plain legal language. Then, the paper provides an example of foreign experience in the field with the aim to illustrate the initiatives for modernizing the Spanish legal language which have been carried out in Spain over the last few years.

Lawyers are widely and resolutely criticised for their writing and communication skills.  As Theodore Blumberg wrote: “Legal writing, despite centuries of criticism (constructive and otherwise) remains steadfastly awful.”  So why do lawyers shirk their responsibility to communicate clearly and effectively with their clients, who are, after all, paying their bills?  Is it that hard to communicate legal concepts clearly and effectively? 
Plain language should be easy.  It certainly sounds easy.  In this paper, I will examine the definition of plain language as stated above, describe what it means, what its detractors say, its history and then discuss the 3 main elements of this definition – language, structure and design.  Finally, I will add a few more elements that are particularly relevant to legal writing and conclude with my agreement that the definition above is indeed a succinct and comprehensive one for written communication.

This work points toward a need for a plainer legal language: a legal language that is not a wall between those seeking justice and justice itself. We, as Law professionals, have become increasingly comfortable with a type of technical language that excludes those who have not entered the classrooms of Law Schools. And we often fail to find a problem with the fact that non-professionals need a “translator” –a
lawyer– to explain the contents of the rules and laws to them.

As is well known, the Plain language movement has been influential in a number of areas of public life over the last few decades. Within the legal sphere it has raised general awareness concerning the need to make legal matters and legal documents more comprehensible and accessible to non-experts, particularly in today's digitalized world where information is freely available to the general public. In this paper my aim is to provide an overview of the way the Plain language movement has evolved in the legal sphere since the 1970s. In particular, I will highlight the following points: (1) the reasons why the Plain language movement came into being; (2) the major successes of plain language in the legal sphere over the last 40 years; (3) the areas where legalese still predominates, and the reasons for the resistance to change; and (4) the way the Plain language movement has adapted to the digitalized world and the implications for future development. My observations will be mainly restricted to the English-speaking world, including international organizations where English is one of the official languages, but I will occasionally make reference to other plain language organizations outside the English-speaking world where this seems relevant. I also provide a list of the major organizations involved in promoting plain language in English in the legal sphere today as a reference guide.

This paper addresses the issue of incomprehensible consumer contracts – the small print. I argue that when people suffer loss because they did not understand a contract condition, we should view it as a cognitive accident.  This changes our perspective to one of duty of care, and risk management. I argue that processes are as important as templates or models, and I speculate about what an emerging genre of human-readable contract might look like.

A version of this paper was subsequently published as chapter in Marcelo Corrales, Helena Haapio and Mark Fenwick (eds), Research Handbook on Contract Design, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022.

2.ª edición muy ampliada del manual teórico y práctico de expresión escrita para juristas noveles y expertos, publicado en 2012. Se centra en enseñar a redactar con un lenguaje sencillo, claro y correcto. También incluye una explicación didáctica del lenguaje argumentativo jurídico.
NOVEDADES
Nuevo capítulo sobre el lenguaje argumentativo jurídico.
Se ha incorporado un amplio listado de expresiones jurídicas y un índice analítico de ellas.
Nueva lista de marcadores del discurso.
Se ha completado la información sobre signos de puntuación.
Se ha revisado la 1.ª edición y se han corregido erratas.

"Seven years have passed since ‘Legal English and Plain Language: an introduction’ (Williams 2004) was published. Since then several changes have occurred in the field of legal drafting in English-speaking countries and institutions which move in the direction of the proposals endorsed by the Plain language movement. In this paper I attempt to outline and contextualize some of the major changes that have taken place since 2004.
Probably the most striking transformation over the last few years in the English-speaking world has come about in the United Kingdom, particularly in Edinburgh and Westminster. In 2004 the newly-established Scottish Parliament had not yet broached the question of modernizing the drafting style of its laws. But that was shortly to come. Likewise in Westminster in 2004, with the exception of the Tax Law Rewrite Project (Williams 2007), there was little to indicate that the drafting of legislation was to undergo the major changes that have taken place recently. A number of areas of legal language have also been modernized in the United States in the past few years, though the impact of Plain language on legislative drafting has been less incisive when compared to the UK.
My main conclusion is that, if we observe the question of legal drafting and Plain language in the English-speaking world as a whole, there has been a shift of focus since 2004. Not long ago I spoke of a “North-South divide” (Williams 2006: 239), with innovation coming largely from the southern hemisphere (especially Australia and New Zealand) whilst the northern hemisphere – particularly the US and the UK – appeared to be more resistant to change. Today my perception is rather different: I would be more inclined to distinguish between national drafting bodies as ‘innovators’ and international drafting bodies as ‘conservatives’. The changes in drafting style that have occurred recently in the UK and, to some extent, in the US would not appear to have been matched in those international bodies where English is one of the official languages, notably the United Nations and the European Union. I briefly analyse why international bodies may be less inclined than national bodies to change their drafting styles."

In this paper I begin by briefly describing some of the main characteristics of written legal English which differentiate it from other genres, such as sentence length and the complexity of its sentence structures, repetitiveness, the high concentration of Latinisms and archaic or rarely used lexical items etc. (Bhatia 1993; Tiersma 1999). Such features have been widely held for centuries as having an exclusionary function, entrenching the privileges of the legal profession. With the growth of the Plain Language movement over the last few decades in all the major English-speaking countries, however, calls for radical changes in legal English have become increasingly widespread (Asprey 1991), and cases of enacted legislative texts following the principles of Plain Language can already be found in several countries, e.g. South Africa, Australia and Canada. I analyse the proposals of the Plain Language movement and the feasibility of making legal texts more comprehensible to the layperson without running the risk of ‘dumbing down' such texts and creating new problems of ambiguity in interpretation that could end up by being detrimental to the public at large.

After an encouraging start, the state-sponsored plain
language initiative ‘Progetto Chiaro!’ fizzled out several years ago.
So Italians are once again left to grapple with the
complexities of bureaucratese, an area still in need of
drastic reform.

every profession has a specialized jargon associated to it, similar is the legal profession and the jargon used is called Legalese, but when the technical terms in such a communication gain a prevalence then the communication of the same gets hindered.

What makes legalese difficult is the fact that the legal authors tend to forget the fact that their readers might be laypeople who are not very well or in certain cases not at all acquainted with these terms.

Plain Language provides an alternative method to convey the same message in a simpler and easier language.

After centuries of following hidebound tradition and of using antiquated legalese, things finally seem to be moving, albeit slowly, towards a more modern drafting style.
In this article I focus on three areas where changes are already visible:
• the UK Tax Law Rewrite Project
• the Acts of the Scottish Parliament
• gender-neutral drafting in the UK.

[Phenomenology of legalese] The quality of legal language and the theme of its obscurity constitutes an interesting subject of studies for both linguistic and legal scholars. To investigate the connection between the formal and the substantial dimension of law, this essay will position the theme of legal language in the broader perspective of " law and literature " studies and analyse some traits of " legalese " explaining its sources and its negative implications in politics and society.

Complexity of legal language and criticisms of its dense and incomprehensible character over the years has culminated in the Plain Language Movement. Two of the most significant steps taken in this Movement were the Plain Writing Act in the United States and the Clear Writing Campaign in the European Union. This Article seeks to evaluate how well documents comply with the Plain Writing Act and the Clear Writing Campaign Guidelines in order to identify and provide remedies for weaknesses in each of the Guidelines. Finally, it will include practical suggestions on how to foster plain language writing in the future.

Plain Legal Language (PLL) emerged as opposed to legalese (traditional legal language) has been criticized for being archaic, incomprehensible and wanting of effective communication. Many developed countries have endorsed PLL in legal drafting yet, in Sri Lanka, lawyers still follow the age old forms out of habit even in the absence of a prescribed form. This paper, examines the effect of renouncing the legal rights available to guarantors by law embodied in Latin maxims to a layman who signs as a guarantor without the help of a Notary Public by expressing their meaning in PLL. This paper focuses on a sample clause containing two Latin maxims: beneficium divisionis and beneficium ordinis seu excussionis which has been revised by using a process of revision created by the writer. The Original and Revised Clauses were circulated among a group of English speaking individuals to formulate an opinion on their degree of comprehension and their views by comparing the two clauses. The findings reveal that the Original Clause is complicated and gobbledygook and the Revised Clause is understandable at first reading as the meaning is clear and succinct. Certain participants expressed that Latin maxims when translated lose their true meaning and they doubted the acceptance of the revised clause before courts without any precedent. The paper concludes by citing case law to answer the question of precedent and justifying the moral obligation of a legal draftsman to draft in PLL in a country where Standard English is spoken only by a minority. Keywords—Plain Legal Language (PLL), Legalese, Maxims, beneficium divisionis, beneficium ordinis seu excussionis

The present paper is intended to be a practical guide for teachers who need to run writing for law classes for pre-experienced law students with no or little experience of academic or legal writing. It provides the teachers with advice on how to teach students to draft modern documents by sequencing and selecting the content that reflects the needs of practising lawyers. It shows how legal writing stems from academic and general writing. Overlapping or common elements of academic and legal writing are identified and sequenced in order to create an introductory base for writing for legal purposes. Types of texts that lawyers draft have been selected and used as the scaffolding for writing tasks specially designed to suit the students' proficiency and expertise.

A oferta de serviços públicos digitais (e-serviços) avança no Brasil, mas a população tem dificuldade para se engajar. Uma queixa comum é achar o contato com o governo pela internet complicado. Os obstáculos para interagir com governo eletrônico vêm sendo discutidos sem confrontar o papel do burocratês, o estilo textual do setor público. Este estudo investigou como o estilo textual pode influenciar na compreensibilidade de informações sobre e-serviços, e em que
medida o burocratês gera dúvidas de compreensão em leitores proficientes. A pesquisa articulou conceitos sobre compreensibilidade textual na Ergonomia, Design da Informação e Psicolinguística; examinou características linguísticas do burocratês; reuniu informações sobre habilidades de leitura dos brasileiros; reuniu informações sobre o movimento e a técnica Linguagem Simples; averiguou o estágio de digitalização de serviços públicos federais. Fez um levantamento
documental de diretrizes de Linguagem Simples em onze governos internacionais e nacionais. Conduziu um estudo experimental em que 42 adultos com pósgraduação em diferentes áreas leram um texto sobre o benefício Auxílio-doença conforme o site do INSS e na versão reescrita em Linguagem Simples, aferindo a compreensão em cada condição. A versão em Linguagem Simples gerou mais acertos na primeira leitura, suscitou menos releituras e demandou menos tempo para completar o teste de compreensão. O experimento também mediu a percepção de usar textos e sites governamentais, que foi igual nos grupos: informações em sites e aplicativos são confusas e difíceis de entender, textos não se preocupam em facilitar a vida dos usuários, que preferem buscar informações em sites independentes.

Young persons are one of the most vulnerable members of the community. Re-instantiating the law into a language accessible for young persons is helpful as law is one form of the protection of their rights. What if the re-instantiated language is not accessible to them?
This master’s thesis provides a set of linguistically-informed principles that can be used in writing public legal information texts for young persons. It examines how the ideational meanings of legal statute are re-instantiated in public legal information (PLI) texts drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics tools – namely taxis and logico-semantics. The linguistic features are interpreted based on Martin’s (2006) hierarchy of instantiation. The PLI and legal statute texts have the same genres with different purposes. Graphological layout scaffolds complex ideational meanings of both genres. The PLI and legal statute texts have relatively similar lexico-grammatical features –combining intricacy, embedding, and lower rank complexing. The PLI texts ‘virtually quotes’ the legal statute. These linguistic features may have been due to the influence of the Plain Language Movement. This thesis suggests that the PLI texts maintain two perspectives in re-instantiating: the legal system and plain language standards. Maintaining such perspectives creates a tension between spoken and written system potentials resulting to ideational complexities of the PLI texts. Accordingly, the ‘virtual quoting’ creates a vector that carry legal entities from legal statutes to the PLI texts making the text ideationally abstract. This thesis also discovered that the language of the law cannot be ‘plain’ because the semiotic meaning of the legal system is not simple. Therefore, it is impossible to de-complexify the legal statute unless we retrieve the semiotic meanings up the cline. The main thing this thesis can suggest is to move up to the context – register. Based on the findings and discussions, I propose 5 principles: (1) elaborate legal entities; (2) elaborate legal entities using processes referring to observable physical activities; (3) control the amount of ideation in the field; (4) control the number of sequences and figures; (5) use graphological layout for textual organisation and/or to construe ideational meanings.

This research center profile describes the Simplification Centre, from its origin as a university research center to its present status as a not-for-profit dedicated to education and advocacy. We address the problem of poorly designed complex information in societies where a significant proportion of people have poor functional literacy. Our main activities are education, training, advocacy, and demonstration. This brings together a network of designers, writers and students to tackle " orphan " design projects—important communications that have no owner taking responsibility for effectiveness. Much of the poorly designed information we experience demonstrates the absence of professional processes for design and testing, so our goal is to articulate good practice to make it accessible to non-professionals.

The language of law is complex and needs to be investigated to facilitate its easy understanding. The present study addresses this need by analyzing a mini-corpus comprising two short texts taken from Pakistan's Code of Civil Procedure 1908 and the U.K.'s Civil Procedure Rules 1998 with Halliday's ideational metafunction, which is suited for analyzing procedural texts (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). The study identified the transitivity patterns in the mini corpus. The findings showed simpler construction of processes in the U.K. civil procedure text sample as compared to Pakistan's Civil Procedure text sample, whereas the analysis showed a similar complex construction of nominal phrases in both texts. The study is expected to contribute toward an easy understanding of legal language. It is also hoped that this study will promote further research in this important area with pedagogical implications.

Que el desconocimiento de la ley no exime de su cumplimiento es una de las máximas jurídicas que se pueden encontrar a día de hoy no solo en los sistemas jurídicos basados en el derecho continental, sino también en aquellos regidos por el derecho anglosajón o common law.

Sin embargo, el lenguaje jurídico, en tanto que lenguaje de especialidad, supone efectivamente una barrera lingüística para el público lego y genera un sentimiento de extrañeza e incomprensión tanto en las personas con un nivel de educación formal bajo como entre aquellas que han podido gozar de un mayor nivel de instrucción (cf. Cornu 2005: 12).

La dificultad para comprender estos tipos textuales por amplios sectores de la sociedad ha dado lugar a diferentes movimientos en favor de su simplificación lingüística. Entre ellos destaca el movimiento del plain English o de la plain language, surgido en los países anglófonos a partir de la década de 1960. Este movimiento se ha ido extendiendo también por los países de habla hispana –bajo la denominación de “lenguaje claro”, “lenguaje llano”, “lenguaje ciudadano” o “modernización del lenguaje” (cf. Becker n.d.; Poblete Olmedo & Fuenzalida González 2018)⁠– y francesa –con el término “langage clair” o “vulgarisation juridique” (cf. Fernbach 2003; Markey 2008)⁠– entre otros (cf. Asprey 2003)⁠.

Esta tendencia parece haber cristalizado, en mayor o menor medida, en un consenso general que establece que la comprensibilidad de los textos jurídico‑administrativos constituye un derecho ciudadano cuya responsabilidad recae sobre los Estados y sus instituciones (cf. Arenas Arias 2018; Edelmann 2016 : 51; Poblete Olmedo & Fuenzalida González 2018; Ramírez, Pérez, & Lanne-Lenne 2019)⁠. Como consecuencia, numerosos Estados han comenzado a adoptar medidas para simplificar lingüísticamente los textos jurídico-administrativos, entre las cuales se encuentra la creación de textos no justiciables en lenguaje claro para la divulgación de contenidos jurídicos, ya sea en formato papel o digital. Con esta contribución quisiera centrarme precisamente en este tipo de medidas y analizar la difusión de contenidos legislativos a través de internet. Para ello me centraré en dos plataformas en línea, la chilena Ley fácil y la quebequesa Éducaloi.

Nie miałem czasu na napisanie krótkiego listu, więc napisałem długi. Mark Twain Długie słowa sprawiają mi wielką trudność. Kubuś Puchatek Abstrakt Wraz ze wzrostem popularności idei " plain English " , czyli prostej odmiany języka angielskiego, pojawiła się potrzeba zmiany podejścia do nauczania sprawności pisania. Teksty, również teksty prawnicze, mają być teraz jasne, przystępne i zrozumiałe dla przeciętnego odbiorcy. Idea " plain English " kiełkowała od połowy XX wieku i teraz staje się obowiązującym prawem w wielu krajach na świecie. Wpływa ona też w istotny sposób na treści nauczane na kursach angielskiego języka prawniczego i zdecydowanie ułatwia pracę lektorów tego języka. Obecnie nie stają już oni w obliczu nauczania archaicznego, niezrozumiałego, nasyconego zapożyczeniami " legalese " , a raczej oczekuje się od nich, że przygotują absolwentów prawa do sprawnego posługiwania się nowoczesnym językiem, zgodnym ze współczesnymi wymaganiami pracodawców. Artykuł pokazuje, jak można modelować taki kurs, jakie zagadnienia językowe należy uwzględnić w jego programie i jak je rozwijać oraz prezentuje przykłady materiałów dydaktycznych, jakie mogą być wykorzystywane w trakcie rozwijania sprawności pisania.

Can we dispense with lawyers as intermediaries between the law and its subjects? Can laypeople have direct access to the law? The Plain English Movement (PEM) has long promoted the use of plain language in legal writing as the way to demystify the law, and many governments and private corporations have expended significant resources on drafting legislation and legal documents in plain language. This article argues that the PEM has exaggerated the capacity of plain language to render the law intelligible to the non-lawyer, obscuring the deeper question of legal complexity by focusing solely on language and style. Using the law effectively requires expertise that goes far beyond understanding the meaning of the words used to communicate it: certain complex aspects of the law cannot be eliminated by mere simplification of language, and this article demonstrates that other specialized skills are required over and above the ability to penetrate technical language. The paradigmatic illustration of the need for such skills is litigation.

Trans activists in the UK might get confused by the phrasing in the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, section 9 (1), particularly by the phrase ‘for all purposes’:

‘Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).’

This phrase has a specific legal meaning and history. It is short for ‘to/for all intents and purposes’, going back to English law in the 16th century. It means: ‘in every practical sense’ or ‘virtually’.
https://miroslavimbrisevic.wordpress.com/2020/03/06/the-language-of-law-to-all-intents-and-purposes/

While human-oriented controlled languages developed and applied in the domain of technical documentation have received considerable attention, language control exerted in the process of legislative drafting has, until recently, gone relatively unnoticed by the controlled language community. This paper considers existing legislative drafting guidelines from the perspective of controlled language. It presents the results of a qualitative comparison of the rule sets of four German-language legislative drafting guidelines from Austria, Germany and Switzerland with a representative collection of controlled language rules published by the German Professional Association for Technical Communication. The analysis determines the extent to which the respective rule sets control the same or similar aspects of language use and identifies the main differences between legislative drafting guidelines and controlled language rules for technical writing.

The present article aims at exploring the issue of intertextuality with reference to the specific usage of numbers in legal discourse. In this regard, the analysis of legal citations seems to be of particular interest to legal linguistics and legal translation as it concerns semantic, pragmatic and stylistic issues related to legal language.  These aspects are discussed by analyzing European legislation and judicial decisions issued by the European Court of Human Rights, in order to demonstrate that legal citations are used to eliminate internal contradictions within the whole legal framework, thus reinforcing the systemic character of the law. Finally, this research focuses on the usage of numbers to achieve intelligibility and user-friendly layout in legal documents, as suggested by the Plain Language Movement.
Key words: numbers, legal citations, intertextuality, legal discourse, Plain Language Movement, European Legislation, European Court of Human Rights.

Nella letteratura contemporanea è molto diffusa la tesi secondo cui la legislazione sarebbe una forma di comunicazione simile, se non identica, alla conversazione ordinaria e, pertanto, l’interpretazione legislativa costituirebbe una attività analoga alla comprensione quotidiana. In particolare, il c.d. modello conversazionale sostiene che interpretazione legislativa e comprensione ordinaria si articolino secondo un analogo processo, retto da regole inferenziali identiche o assimilabili, e riconducile, sostanzialmente, alle tesi di Paul Grice. Lo scopo di questo libro è proprio quello di analizzare somiglianze e differenze tra conversazione ordinaria e interpretazione giuridica, assumendo, quale punto di paragone, la teoria delle implicature conversazionali di Grice. In particolare, due sono gli obiettivi principali perseguiti.
Il primo obiettivo è quello di mostrare come la teoria di Grice, pur presentando alcuni problemi interni, sia un buon modello esplicativo per la conversazione quotidiana, inclusa quella normativa.
Il secondo obiettivo è quello di argomentare contro l’adeguatezza di tale modello rispetto all’interpretazione legislativa: il testo mostra come le tesi contrarie siano fondate su alcuni fondamentali fraintendimenti del modello in questione e/o ignorino le peculiarità della prassi giuridica. Per contro, il fallimento del modello griceano consente di fare emergere alcuni tratti caratteristici di tale prassi.

In this volume the author examines verbal constructions in prescriptive legal texts written in English. Modal auxiliaries such as shall, may and must are analysed, as well as indicative tenses such as the present simple, and also non-finite constructions such as the -ing form and -ed participles. Results are based on specially compiled corpora of prescriptive texts coming from a wide range of English-speaking countries and also international organizations such as the European Union and the UN. The author also analyses the nature, extent and impact of the calls for change in legal language coming from the Plain Language Movement. Although legal language tends to be depicted as being highly conservative and unchanging, the author shows that in certain parts of the English-speaking world a minor revolution would appear to be taking place, while in other parts there is greater resistance to change.

Standard forms of contracts are usually written in the traditional legal drafting style. They are difficult to read and understand by construction practitioners. This study aims to objectively assess the impact of contract drafting styles on the readability level of the revised and clarity-accredited standard form of consultancy contract in New Zealand and compare it with its predecessor version. Clauses from both contract versions were evaluated using a traditional readability formula – Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES). Results revealed that although the revised version is accredited as clearly written by the Plain Language Commission, only 11 clauses in the revised version are predicted to be accessible to readers ages 14 years old and younger. The results showed that clauses in the revised version are readable at ‘difficult’ reading grade level, while clauses in the predecessor version are readable at ‘very difficult’ reading level. But the revised version is easier to read than its predecessor, even though the successor comprises more clauses, words and sentences than its predecessor. Our results provide a further explanation about contract readability from an objective readability prediction perspective with the use of readability formula.

Plain Legal Language (PLL) emerged as opposed to legalese (traditional legal language) has been criticized for being archaic, incomprehensible and wanting of effective communication. Many developed countries have endorsed PLL in legal drafting yet, in Sri Lanka, lawyers still follow the age old forms out of habit even in the absence of a prescribed form. This paper, examines the effect of renouncing the legal rights available to guarantors by law embodied in Latin maxims to a layman who signs as a guarantor without the help of a Notary Public by expressing their meaning in PLL. This paper focuses on a sample clause containing two Latin maxims: beneficium divisionis and beneficium ordinis seu excussionis which has been revised by using a process of revision created by the writer. The Original and Revised Clauses were circulated among a group of English speaking individuals to formulate an opinion on their degree of comprehension and their views by comparing the two clauses. The findings reveal that the Original Clause is complicated and gobbledygook and the Revised Clause is understandable at first reading as the meaning is clear and succinct. Certain participants expressed that Latin maxims when translated lose their true meaning and they doubted the acceptance of the revised clause before courts without any precedent. The paper concludes by citing case law to answer the question of precedent and justifying the moral obligation of a legal draftsman to draft in PLL in a country where Standard English is spoken only by a minority. Keywords—Plain Legal Language (PLL), Legalese, Maxims, beneficium divisionis, beneficium ordinis seu excussionis

"In the English-speaking world, contracts – like many other texts pertaining to the sphere of private law, e.g. wills – still tend to be littered with relics of a bygone era, such as archaic formulaic expressions (“now, therefore, this agreement witnesseth that…”), strings of synonyms or near-synonyms (“null and void”, “invalid, illegal and unenforceable”), and adverbial expressions typifying a more antiquated style of legal writing (“the Guarantors hereby agree that their obligations hereunder…”). After briefly highlighting some of the main linguistic features characterizing contracts, I compare the intrinsically ‘conservative’ nature of most contract drafters with the tendency among many legislative drafters to adopt a more modern approach to writing texts along the lines suggested by plain language exponents.
  I thus attempt to solve the paradox as to why such “dysfunctional” (Adams 2008a) drafting practices continue to be used in contracts even in the 21st century, i.e. why it is that drafters of contracts are generally so reluctant to abandon old habits. Evidently, one must conclude that, despite their old-fashioned appearance and their dense legalese, contracts are still, by and large, capable of doing the job they are meant to do. Equally clearly, however, there is considerable room for improvement, since “legalese renders a contract a chore to read, negotiate, interpret, and use as a model” (ibid.), resulting in companies wasting both time and money, as well as incurring the risk of disputes.
  Finally, I ask whether the situation is likely to change in the foreseeable future.
"