Survey data, malpractice research and psycholinguistics all point the same way — plain English is not a stylistic preference, it is a professional obligation
A good lawyer knows the law; a great lawyer can explain it clearly to their client. Clients do not just assess their lawyers on legal outcomes – they judge them on how clearly things are explained and how well they felt heard. Decades of data confirm this consistently. For international lawyers writing in English to non-native clients, the stakes are higher: research shows that readers processing a second language face a measurable extra cognitive burden, which heavy legal writing makes significantly worse. Plain English – short sentences, active voice, front-loaded structure, common vocabulary – is not about simplifying the law. It is about respecting the client’s time and understanding. AI drafting tools help with the mechanical parts of writing but require a human native-speaker review before anything reaches the client. Given the amount of writing that makes up a lawyer’s work, it is important to get it right for the client and give them something useful.
Lawyers need to know the law – that’s obvious. But if they can’t explain the situation and the options clearly, trust evaporates fast. That is especially true when both lawyer and client are working in English as a second language. The problem is rarely vocabulary. It’s usually style: how the advice is structured, how long it takes to get to the point, and how much the writing sounds like a human being rather than a legal document.
Ask a lawyer what clients value most and the answer is usually the same: winning. Ask the clients themselves and a slightly different picture emerges. While clients also want successes, decades of survey data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe show that clients judge their lawyers primarily on how the relationship felt – how well they were kept informed, how clearly things were explained and how much they felt heard – not on the result alone.
The International Bar Association found that poor communication was one of the top reasons companies stopped using a law firm, and that most of those clients left without saying why. A 2025 Legal Client Experience Report surveying 433 law firm clients found that nearly 80% felt uncared for, with communication failures cited as the leading cause of dissatisfaction. When the American Bar Association released its Profile of Legal Malpractice Claims 2008–2011, it showed that roughly 90% of legal malpractice claims stem not from poor legal work but from poor communication.
None of this means technical skill does not matter. It means that clients cannot easily evaluate your legal analysis – but they can evaluate whether you explained things clearly, answered promptly and made them feel part of the process. Communication is the proxy they use for competence.
The legal profession has known for decades that clients struggle with jargon, yet the habit persists. Phrases like “under pain of,” “hereinafter referred to as,” and “notwithstanding the foregoing” do not add any useful information over plain alternatives. They exist because lawyers learned them from other lawyers, not because clients asked for them.
The plain English movement – backed by legislation in the United States, New Zealand, and several EU member states – has pushed back against this tradition for good reason. Research consistently shows that plain language reduces misunderstandings, shortens the time clients spend seeking clarification and increases their confidence in the advice they receive. For client-facing correspondence in particular, there is very little legal writing that cannot be expressed more simply without any loss of precision.
Plain English is not about dumbing things down. It means shorter sentences, active verbs, strong words and a structure that puts the most important point first. It means writing “you must file the claim within three months” rather than “the submission of any claim shall be effected within a period not exceeding three months from the date hereof.” The first version respects your client’s time. The second respects a tradition the client never asked to be part of.
Many lawyers feel the need to include every nuance, qualification and historical footnote before reaching a conclusion. The instinct is understandable – it feels thorough, it demonstrates research and it provides cover if the advice is later questioned. It is also a mistake.
Clients pay for your judgment, not your research notes. If a client asks whether a contract is enforceable, they want the answer in the first paragraph, not after five pages of legal history. The analysis that led you to the answer belongs in the document too – but after the answer, for the client who wants to check your reasoning, not before it as a condition of receiving your conclusion.
Length is not a signal of quality. It is often a signal of unedited thinking. A well-constructed two-page opinion that gives a clear answer, explains the key risks and tells the client what to do next will serve them better than a ten-page memo that makes them hunt for guidance buried in the qualifications. The American social psychologist Tom Tyler, one of the leading researchers on client satisfaction in legal matters, found that clients care most about the process – how the matter felt to them – not the volume of paper produced.
For international clients reading in a second language, an overlong document is not just inconvenient. It is a genuine barrier. Every extra page is extra reading time, extra cognitive load and a greater risk that the important point gets lost. Discipline about length is part of plain English, and plain English is part of your service.
International lawyers often assume that non-native English-speaking clients are comfortable with formal, technical language. The logic runs something like this: if English is already a foreign language for the client, surely ornate legal English is no harder than any other English. This is wrong, and the research shows why. As a legal proofreader, I am often told, “you don’t need to check this so carefully, it’s only going to Italians / French / Japanese” – as if clients who might not have perfect English do not need to receive decent English communications. That is not only a bit rude, it is also a bad idea.
Psycholinguistic studies confirm that people processing a second language work harder to extract meaning, manage a smaller working memory buffer for complex sentences, and miss nuance that native speakers catch automatically. A German corporate counsel, a Japanese entrepreneur or a Polish investor reading your advice in English faces a double burden: understanding the legal content and navigating the language at the same time. Dense, passive-voice prose with extra conditions hidden in sentences makes that burden significantly heavier.
Academic research published on the plain English movement and non-native speakers confirms this directly: plain English benefits L2 readers at least as much as native speakers, and often more. Short sentences are easier to follow in a second language. Active constructions are more predictable. Common vocabulary requires less mental lookup. The one reservation researchers note is that some “plain” English features – particularly phrasal verbs like “set out”, “carry out” or “build up” – can themselves cause difficulty for non-native readers, since phrasal verbs rarely translate literally. Good legal English for international clients avoids both archaic formalism and idiomatic colloquialisms. It finds the register in between.
Beyond comprehension, there is a question of trust. When clients receive a dense, jargon-heavy document they find difficult to follow, their instinct is not to ask for clarification – it is to feel anxious and, sometimes, to disengage. A well-written letter that a client can actually read tells them something important: their lawyer considers their understanding a priority. In a cross-border instruction, where the client may already feel uncertain about a foreign legal system, that reassurance is not a luxury.
Research and client surveys point to the same practical habits:
Artificial intelligence tools now sit in most lawyers’ workflows. They can draft a first version quickly, restructure a document and suggest alternative phrasing. Used well, they save time on the mechanical parts of writing. The risks, however, are well documented and particularly relevant for international practice.
The most serious risk is known as hallucination: AI tools generate plausible-sounding text that is factually wrong, citing cases that do not exist or misstating legal principles with apparent confidence. A Stanford University study found that legal AI models gave incorrect answers in at least one in six queries; other research suggests hallucination rates above 30% for complex documents. In 2023, a New York attorney was sanctioned by a federal court after submitting a brief containing entirely fictitious case citations generated by ChatGPT. Similar cases have since appeared across multiple jurisdictions. Unchecked AI output is a professional liability.
For international lawyers, there is a second, subtler problem. AI translation and drafting tools can produce text that is grammatically correct but tonally wrong – too stiff, too colloquial, or simply unnatural in a way a native speaker would catch immediately. Research on non-native English writers finds that AI editing tools raise the apparent fluency of their writing without necessarily making it natural, which can mislead readers into assuming a higher level of drafting precision than actually exists. A client who receives a letter that “sounds right” but contains a quietly mistranslated obligation has been done a disservice, not a favour.
The consensus among legal writing specialists and AI researchers is that machine translation and AI drafting work best as a starting point, not a finishing line. The professional standard emerging in practice is Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE): a human linguist – ideally a native speaker of the target language with legal knowledge – reviews and corrects AI output before it reaches the client. This is not an argument against using AI; it is an argument for knowing what it cannot yet do on its own.
Plain English amplifies this point. AI tools tend to produce competent, averaged-out prose that avoids the worst excesses of legalese, but also lacks the precision of genuinely good writing. The final edit – cutting the word that is technically accurate but sounds robotic or cold, reordering the sentence so it lands correctly on a non-native reader, catching the phrasal verb that will puzzle a client in Warsaw or Tokyo – requires a human being who knows the language as it is actually spoken.
Before sending any client-facing document in English, ask yourself:
Clients – wherever they come from and whatever language they normally think in – want to understand their lawyer. They want to feel that their lawyer is talking to them, not at them, and not through a wall of protective formality. Survey after survey confirms this. So does the evidence on malpractice claims, client churn and the reasons clients switch firms without saying why.
For international lawyers writing in English to clients who are not native speakers, the stakes are higher, not lower. Dense, formal, AI-smoothed English may look good, but it creates distance precisely where trust needs to be built. Good legal English – clear, direct, human – is one of the most effective client service tools available. It just requires the same care and attention as any other part of the work.
Need a native British English proofreader or Polish-English translator for your legal documents?
