Lawyers are coached into an ‘unnatural way of being’ (according to Elizabeth de Stadler of Novcon) which covers how they behave in meetings, how they interact with colleagues and clients and how they write – from emails to contracts.
She says we need to unlearn those behaviours as they create a negative outlook and make us unpopular.
<Ouch!>
Of course, legal language has been created over centuries. For native English-speakers this goes back to the eleventh century (CE). According to Harry Bevan of World CC ‘legalese exists today because of the history of the English language and was added to the language to alienate laypeople‘.
So placing ourselves on a pedestal – whatever your profession or role – is as old as time immemorial.
‘Every group, in order to define itself and to become special, spoke special languages and had secret codes… whether it was the craft guilds or whether it was the church’ [Tim Cummins of World CC]
But does giving up our (ie the lawyers’) special language, our Latin phrases and our legalese, also require lawyers to resign their underlying identity and what makes lawyers special?
Although there are some phrases which are hard to justify – such as per annum, there are others which are difficult to neatly simplify. I have regularly tried to persuade a senior contract expert to drop ‘mutatis mutandis’ but the alternatives are often highly complex and convoluted.
The problem is that while these terms of jargon have a place, contract professionals, contract writers and lawyers all need to realise that it is critical that they deliver exactly the service that their client needs.
Most of our clients are not asking us to create documents that communicate primarily to other lawyers. So (as Elizabeth said) ‘we need to come off our pedestal that we built in the name of legal exceptionalism and converse with other humans’.
If we continue to use this style of language we will just continue to isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity… but that includes our clients.
We should only lean into that specialism when it is necessary to be a professional, and avoid it when we are at risk of making it so complicated that we have removed ourselves from the real world.
What should we do?
We have to climb down from our pedestals.
Let’s drop the pomposity, the terms of art and the language that sets us part… and let’s serve.
We have to simplify.
Related posts: pedants or public, avoid wordsmithery, steps to simplifying contracts.
