The cost of revising forms into plain English.

In fact, revising all your form documents into plain English may be unrealistically expensive and time-consuming. Who’s going to pay for it?

Revising complex legal documents into plain English is taxing, tedious, and slow. The resulting plain-English only looks like it was easy to write. In reality, the process has several steps and usually requires collaboration. For example, here’s a process I recommend in my book, Preparing Legal Documents Nonlawyers Can Read and Understand:

• Read the entire document from beginning to end—taking notes—to get a sense of the content and complexity of the text.
• Create a list of the substantive content of the document. This will help you master the content, and you can use it as a checklist when you revise.
• Sort and order the content list, considering reader needs, the important topics, the order in which the transaction will be carried out, and other considerations. Begin thinking about headings, subheadings, and numbering.
• Rewrite the text in plain English.
• Revise and edit the text.
• Test the text on intended users and ask others to read and comment on the text. Your other readers should include at least one lawyer who is an expert on the subject matter and at least one nonlawyer unfamiliar with the subject matter.

Now imagine that process for a series of complex transactional documents. Again we must ask—who is going to pay for it?