Conclusions in Recent Report Summarized By The Economist Suggest Lawyers Prefer Simplified Language and The Report Then Tries To Answer Why It Persists.
The June 3, 2023 issue of The Economist reports on a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Martinez and MIT/University of Edinburgh colleagues) about why lawyers use legalese and why it persists. The conclusions might surprise you.
The general conclusion was that lawyers preferred simplified language over legalese. So, the authors of the study examined hypotheses as to why it persists.
The “curse of knowledge” hypothesis is the idea that learned people do not know how to write for the less informed. But the researchers found that lawyers, like laypeople, struggled with legalese because it is harder to understand.
The more cynical “it’s just business” hypothesis is the theory that lawyers are intentionally opaque to get clients paying more for their supposed expertise. But that hypothesis did not fit the data because lawyers believed their clients would be more likely to sign simplified contracts.
The “in-group signaling” hypothesis is that legalese is a signal belonging to the legal fraternity such that it is aimed to impress fellow lawyers. But lawyers in the test group debunked this idea because they indicated that they would be more likely to hire the writers of simplified contracts.
The most common defense for legalese, the need for precision, did not hold up because the surveyed lawyers reading simplified contracts rated them just as enforceable as complex ones.
That left researchers with a simple conclusion: the “copy-and-paste hypothesis,” that is that lawyers imitate what previous lawyers have done because the legalese can be incorporated routinely into contracts drafted for clients.
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