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There is hope for the rest of us, as the saying goes, if even lawyers do not understand their own idioms. After asking the obvious question - “why do lawyers write in such a convoluted manner?” - a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team found that lawyers, despite apparently being responsible for their own arcane jargon, often don’t really like it. Less forgivably, sometimes they aren’t even too sure what it all means. “Across two pre-registered experiments, we find that lawyers, like laypeople, were less able to understand and recall 'legalese' contracts than content of equivalent meaning drafted in a simplified register,” they said. In plain English, that means lawyers could better remember and comprehend their own contracts if they were written in plain English.
MIT researchers find 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.”