Editorial: plain language with clients is not style, it is a professional duty

There is a classic excuse in the profession for writing badly: "the law is technical". As if precision demanded obscurity. The truth is the opposite: obscurity usually betrays imprecision. A lawyer who masters a matter can explain it in plain language; one who hides it behind Latin tags and endless subordinate clauses is protecting something, and it is not the client.

This editorial argues that plain language with clients is not a matter of style or a commercial strategy: it is a professional obligation with deontological, economic and human foundations.

Informing the client is a duty, not a courtesy

The Code of Ethics of the Spanish Legal Profession obliges lawyers to keep clients informed of the progress of their matter and to advise them with due diligence. The duty to inform is not fulfilled by delivering incomprehensible texts: to inform is to make understood. A claim the client cannot read, an engagement letter whose fee system they do not understand or an email that does not tell them what risk they run are practical breaches, even if the document formally exists.

We already defended client care in law firms as basic business infrastructure; plain language is its first stone. And it works in both directions: the client who understands collaborates better, signs sooner and disputes the invoice less.

What plain language is not

Let us clear up the usual misunderstanding. Writing plainly is not lowering rigour, nor abandoning technical terms when they are needed, nor turning every document into café talk. It is choosing, for each audience, the level of precision that audience can use. The court receives the technical filing; the client receives the explanation of what that filing asks for, what chance it has and what it will cost. Confusing the two channels is professional laziness.

Nor is it a consultancy fad. Courts have spent years demanding clarity from public administration, and regulators require understandable language in consumer contracts. The legal profession cannot demand for others what it refuses to practise itself.

The economic argument, in case the ethical one is not enough

Trust is a firm's commercial asset, and trust is built through comprehension, not impression. The client who understands the risk accepts an adverse outcome better; the one who signed without understanding experiences the bad outcome as a deception and acts accordingly: fee disputes, bar complaints and poisoned word of mouth. The debates over professional secrecy and client documents show how much the lawyer-client relationship rests on mutual understanding of what is being done and why.

Plain language is also efficient: a clear engagement letter avoids the payment lawsuit, a clear email avoids three phone calls, a clear explanation of the budget avoids later renegotiation. Clarity saves hours, and hours are the inventory.

A modest proposal

Three concrete habits any firm can adopt this month. First, the summary rule: every document going to the client opens with five lines saying what it is, what it asks and what they must do. Second, the non-lawyer review: before sending an important report, have someone on the team without legal training read it; whatever they do not understand gets rewritten. Third, state the numbers: approximate probabilities, real timelines and total costs, with their margins, instead of the comforting "it is a complex matter".

Our analysis of digital disconnection in law firms said that caring for people is also a management technique. With clients it is the same: to care for them is to explain to them. A profession that defends other people's rights cannot afford to speak a language its own defendants do not understand.

This publication's editorials are collected in our Opinion section.