HOW TO MAKE LEGAL DOCUMENTS MORE UNDERSTANDABLE

It’s no secret that legal documents are incomprehensible. Why is this? Researchers from MIT say it’s because lawyers like to put long definitions of legal terms in the middle of sentences. Lawyers do this under the pretext that you have to use big words to be precise in what you’re saying. Also, they do it so they look “professional” in the eyes of their peers. What’s more, they do it so you have to hire a lawyer to understand it (* Actually, that should have been Reason #1). The MIT team has done a study and found that replacing the complex legal jargon with more common language did not change the meaning of the documents they examined, the common reader was better able to understand what the document said, and moving the center-embedded clauses to another portion of the text did not change the meaning of the sentence.
* Well, that study solves everything, doesn’t it? Thanks, boys!
* See, here’s the problem: you got a bunch of nerds who know what to do, but they’ve got no muscle to cause things to change.
* Are they trying to get sued for slander?
* I guess every so often MIT researchers need a break from quarks, gluons and string theory.