Why clarity, conversational writing, and even humor do not necessarily diminish professional authority in American legal practice.
Abstract
Law has its own language for good reasons. Legal concepts require precision, professional communities develop specialized vocabularies, and centuries of doctrine cannot always be translated into ordinary speech without losing something along the way.
Yet American legal communication has increasingly challenged a different proposition: that professional authority requires linguistic solemnity.
The distinction matters.
The modern plain-language movement does not ask lawyers to make the law simplistic. It asks whether complexity belongs to the legal problem itself or has merely been added by the lawyer explaining it. At the same time, American lawyers and law firms increasingly communicate through formats that are not briefs, motions, or legal opinions. Websites, client alerts, professional articles, newsletters, podcasts, and social media have created spaces in which a more conversational legal voice is not only permissible but often more effective.
The result is an interesting coexistence. American legal culture can remain highly technical while encouraging lawyers to write clearly. A law firm article can use storytelling, first-person voice, cultural references, or carefully calibrated humor without ceasing to be serious legal communication. Even dry or deadpan humor may occasionally serve a legitimate rhetorical function.
None of this requires abandoning traditional legal terminology. A term of art that adds precision is different from legalese that merely performs professional authority.
The more interesting question is therefore not whether lawyers should stop sounding like lawyers.
It is whether good lawyers should know when they need to.
Contents
- 1. Does Authority Have to Sound Formal?
- 2. From Legalese to Plain Language
- 3. The Audience Changes the Voice
- 4. A Law Firm Article Is Not a Brief
- 5. Can Lawyers Be Funny?
- 6. Deadpan as a Legal Voice
- 7. Technical Language Still Has a Job
- 8. Authority Without Obscurity
- 9. Writing for Humans — and Machines
- 10. Knowing When to Sound Like a Lawyer
1. Does Authority Have to Sound Formal?
Every profession develops signals of authority.
Law is no exception.
Some are institutional: admission to the bar, professional titles, court procedures, citation systems, and the architecture of legal documents.
Others are linguistic.
For generations, lawyers have learned — sometimes explicitly and sometimes simply by imitation — that legal authority has a particular sound. Sentences become longer. Ordinary verbs acquire nominal forms. Familiar words are replaced by professional expressions. Documents inherit formulas from documents written decades earlier.
Some of this language performs an essential function. Law is a technical discipline, and technical disciplines require technical vocabulary.
But another part performs something different.
It sounds legal.
The distinction between the two is at the center of the modern American discussion about legal writing.
The American Bar Association and legal-writing educators have repeatedly encouraged lawyers to prefer clarity, concision, and precision over unnecessary legalese. The plain-language movement that gained prominence during the twentieth century was not based on the proposition that legal problems are simple. Its argument was almost the opposite: complex ideas require especially careful communication.
This produces an apparent paradox.
A lawyer may spend years acquiring a specialized professional vocabulary only to be told that one sign of mastery is knowing when not to use it.
There is, however, no real contradiction.
Knowing a technical language and depending upon it are different things.
A lawyer who can describe a complicated legal problem only in professional jargon may understand the terminology perfectly. A lawyer who can state the technical proposition, explain its doctrinal significance, and then express its practical consequence in ordinary language demonstrates something more: control over the idea itself.
This is particularly visible in American legal communication because the profession writes for radically different audiences.
A federal appellate judge is not a prospective client.
A general counsel is not a jury.
A client alert is not a motion for summary judgment.
And an article published on a law firm’s website is not an appellate brief.
The language should change accordingly.
That proposition sounds obvious. In practice, lawyers have historically been remarkably reluctant to accept all of its consequences.
The persistence of legalese is partly explained by habit. It is also connected with authority. Lawyers may retain antiquated forms because specialized and mysterious language can create an impression of status and professional power.
That observation points toward a more interesting question than whether a particular expression is old-fashioned.
What exactly makes legal communication authoritative?
If authority depends upon obscurity, plain language represents a threat.
If authority depends upon command of the subject, clarity may demonstrate it.
American legal writing has increasingly moved toward the second answer.
2. From Legalese to Plain Language
Plain language is sometimes misunderstood as an invitation to make legal writing elementary.
That is not its purpose.
The objective is not to remove complexity that genuinely belongs to the law. It is to remove complexity introduced by the writer.
The distinction is fundamental.
A complicated jurisdictional problem may remain complicated after excellent drafting. A sophisticated contractual structure may require specialized terminology. A statutory test may contain distinctions that cannot responsibly be reduced to a slogan.
Plain language does not require pretending otherwise.
What it challenges is the assumption that a complicated subject becomes more accurate when expressed through complicated prose.
American advocates of plain legal language generally describe the objective in terms of clarity, concision, and precision. Those concepts are complementary rather than competing. The intended reader should be able to understand the communication without sacrificing the legal distinctions that matter.
This is why much of the criticism of legalese is directed not at legal terminology itself but at inherited habits.
Verbose expressions.
Redundant legal formulas.
Needlessly indirect constructions.
Long sentences whose architecture requires the reader to reconstruct the proposition before considering whether it is correct.
And, occasionally, Latin used not because the Latin expression is the best description of a legal concept but because Latin still sounds reassuringly like law.
The American Bar Association’s own writing guidance can be strikingly direct on this point. Its guidance on improving legal writing describes unnecessary legalese as an obstacle to comprehension while recognizing that legal writing must still preserve technical accuracy.
That qualification is important.
There is a difference between rejecting unnecessary legalese and pretending that lawyers have no legitimate professional language.
Pacta sunt servanda does not become meaningless merely because the proposition can be translated.
Nor does every traditional expression survive merely because generations of lawyers have used it.
The useful question is functional:
What does this expression add?
If it identifies a precise doctrine, invokes a recognized principle, or communicates efficiently within a professional context, technical language may be doing real work.
If its principal function is to remind the reader that the author went to law school, it probably is not.
There is a difference between speaking the language of law and performing the language of law.
Much of the American plain-language movement can be understood as an attempt to recover that distinction.
3. The Audience Changes the Voice
Legal communication does not take place in the abstract.
Someone is always on the other side.
This may seem self-evident, but it has important consequences for legal writing. The appropriate degree of formality, technical detail, explanation, and even personality depends substantially upon the audience for whom the communication is intended.
A judge does not read like a client.
A client does not read like another lawyer.
A jury does not listen like an appellate court.
And a person who arrives at a law firm’s website because something has gone wrong in his or her life is unlikely to approach the text in the same way as a lawyer researching a procedural question.
The law remains the same.
The communicative task does not.
This distinction has become particularly visible in American legal culture, where lawyers communicate across an increasingly diverse range of formats: briefs, motions, opinions, client alerts, law firm articles, professional publications, newsletters, podcasts, videos, and social media.
Each format creates a different relationship between lawyer and audience.
The court as reader
When the audience is a court, clarity is not an alternative to technical precision. It is part of it.
A judge does not need a lawyer to eliminate the legal complexity of a case. The judge does, however, need the lawyer to organize that complexity.
This is one reason American legal-writing guidance frequently emphasizes the reader’s cognitive burden. A judge may be highly specialized, but the lawyer’s case is not the only case competing for the judge’s attention.
The advocate therefore has an obligation to make the structure of the argument visible.
What happened?
What is the legal question?
What rule governs it?
Why does that rule produce the result being requested?
None of those questions becomes less sophisticated because it can be stated simply.
Indeed, one of the recurring lessons in American advocacy is that a lawyer should not force the court to perform unnecessary work merely to discover what the lawyer is trying to say. Recent ABA guidance on effective legal writing for courts similarly emphasizes structure, tone, audience awareness, and avoiding both unnecessary detail and legalese.
The client as reader
The communicative problem changes again when the audience is a client.
A client rarely needs a demonstration that the lawyer possesses a professional vocabulary. The client needs to understand the situation, the available options, the risks attached to each of them, and what will happen next.
Technical terminology may still be necessary. But when it is necessary, it usually needs to be explained.
This does not mean that lawyers should speak to clients as though the clients were incapable of understanding complexity.
Quite the opposite.
Respect for the client includes making complexity accessible without pretending that it does not exist.
There is a substantial difference between simplifying an explanation and simplifying the underlying problem.
Professional authority and code-switching
The ability to move between these registers may itself be a form of professional competence.
A lawyer can use the precise doctrinal expression when addressing a legal question and then immediately restate its practical meaning in ordinary language.
The second formulation does not necessarily correct the first.
They perform different functions.
Consider a lawyer who invokes a recognized doctrine and then says, in substance: in practical terms, this means that a party cannot create the very obstacle on which it later relies.
The technical formulation locates the argument within the legal system.
The ordinary formulation makes its logic immediately visible.
Professional authority may lie precisely in being able to do both.
This is why plain language should not be understood as a single register that lawyers must adopt everywhere.
It is better understood as a discipline of communication.
The question is not simply, Can this be said more simply?
It is also:
Who needs to understand it, for what purpose, and in what context?
Once that question is asked, another distinction becomes unavoidable.
A lawyer writing an article for a law firm’s website is neither addressing a court nor drafting a private legal opinion.
That lawyer is doing something else.
And American legal communication has increasingly recognized that the voice may change with the medium.
4. A Law Firm Article Is Not a Brief
A law firm website occupies an unusual space in professional communication.
It is public, but it is not legislation.
It is professional, but it is not a pleading.
It may discuss sophisticated legal questions, but its readers are not necessarily lawyers.
And although it can serve a commercial purpose, the best law firm writing does not need to read like advertising.
This creates considerably more freedom of voice than traditional legal writing sometimes allows.
The American Bar Association has expressly recognized this distinction in its guidance on informal professional writing. A law firm blog post is identified as the kind of professional writing in which a less formal style may be appropriate. The recommendations include greater use of personal pronouns, direct questions, shorter sentences, and, where appropriate, even carefully judged humor.
That last point is more significant than it may initially appear.
It does not mean that American professional organizations encourage lawyers to become comedians.
It means that professional seriousness and linguistic solemnity are not the same thing.
A lawyer can explain a serious legal problem in a conversational voice.
A law firm can publish an article that tells a story.
An author can allow personality to appear in legal analysis.
And none of those choices necessarily diminishes the quality of the underlying law.
The emergence of a recognizable voice
Traditional institutional writing often attempts to make the author disappear.
The text speaks on behalf of the organization. Personality is minimized. Individual stylistic characteristics are treated almost as imperfections.
That model remains appropriate in many contexts.
But a professional article can operate differently.
Readers may respond not only to the information being communicated but also to the person apparently communicating it.
This is particularly relevant to lawyers because legal services depend heavily upon trust.
A prospective client does not merely ask whether a law firm knows the applicable law. The client may also be trying to determine how the lawyers think, how they explain problems, and what it might be like to speak with them.
A recognizable voice can communicate some of that information.
It can also make legal analysis memorable.
Thousands of law firm articles explain what happens after a particular notice is received, how a procedure begins, or what elements a legal claim requires.
Far fewer leave the reader remembering who wrote them.
Storytelling without abandoning analysis
Storytelling offers one way to bridge that gap.
A legal article does not cease to be analytical merely because it begins with a person, a problem, or an unexpected event.
In fact, narrative can provide structure to legal explanation.
The reader first encounters the problem.
The law becomes necessary because the reader wants to understand what happens next.
The doctrinal explanation therefore answers a question that the narrative has already created.
This reverses a common structure in traditional legal publishing, where doctrine is presented first and examples are introduced later to illustrate it.
Neither structure is inherently superior.
They simply serve different communicative purposes.
For a professional website, however, narrative has one considerable advantage: it can make a reader interested in a legal concept that the reader would never have searched for independently.
The law is not diluted.
It is encountered through context.
Once conversational writing and storytelling are accepted as legitimate elements of professional communication, an inevitable question follows.
How far can that freedom go?
Can a lawyer be funny?
5. Can Lawyers Be Funny?
Lawyers can be funny.
Whether they should be is a more interesting question.
Humor in professional legal communication creates an obvious tension. Used well, it can make an argument memorable, reduce unnecessary distance between lawyer and reader, and reveal something about the author’s voice. Used badly, it can trivialize a serious problem, undermine professional authority, or make someone else the unwilling subject of the joke.
The relevant question is therefore not whether humor belongs in legal communication.
It already does.
The more useful question is what kind of humor can coexist with professional judgment.
Humor is not the opposite of seriousness
American legal culture offers numerous examples of judges, lawyers, and legal commentators using humor, cultural references, understatement, and irony without abandoning the seriousness of the underlying legal question.
Professional guidance on informal legal writing itself accepts that carefully calibrated humor may have a legitimate place in some forms of legal communication.
A joke that works in a professional article may be entirely inappropriate in a communication concerning a client’s personal tragedy.
A cultural reference that makes an abstract argument memorable may work before one audience and distract another.
And humor directed at the situation is fundamentally different from humor directed at a person.
This last distinction deserves particular attention.
The safest professional humor rarely needs a victim.
A lawyer does not need to make a client appear foolish.
A judge does not need to become a caricature.
An opposing lawyer does not need to be ridiculed.
A public official does not need to be portrayed as incompetent.
Sometimes the situation itself contains enough incongruity.
Law is particularly rich in such situations because legal systems attempt to classify an extraordinarily untidy human reality. Rules require categories. Procedures require sequences. Databases require fields. Human beings, unfortunately for the architecture of all three, have a persistent tendency to produce facts that do not fit elegantly anywhere.
That friction can be funny without anyone being the object of the humor.
Understatement may work better than the joke
Some forms of humor are particularly compatible with professional writing because they do not require the author to announce that something is funny.
Understatement is one of them.
A surprising event can simply be described.
The narrator does not need to explain the absurdity. The reader is allowed to discover it.
This restraint matters.
Once a lawyer begins trying too visibly to entertain the audience, the relationship between expertise and performance can become uncomfortable. The legal analysis risks becoming the setting for the author’s personality rather than the other way around.
Humor works differently when it emerges incidentally from an otherwise serious explanation.
A short aside.
An unexpected comparison.
A literal answer to a rhetorical question.
A sentence whose meaning becomes amusing only because of the paragraph that preceded it.
None requires the lawyer to stop being a lawyer.
In fact, restraint may make the humor more effective precisely because the professional voice remains intact.
Humor as a form of accessibility
There is another reason humor occasionally belongs in legal communication.
Law can be intimidating.
Tax authorities, courts, regulatory agencies, litigation, investigations, and formal notices all carry institutional weight. For a lawyer, many of these interactions are routine. For the person experiencing them for the first time, they may be anything but routine.
A carefully chosen degree of humor can sometimes reduce that psychological distance without minimizing the legal issue.
This is not the same as telling the reader that there is nothing to worry about.
There may be plenty to worry about.
It simply recognizes that seriousness does not require anxiety to be amplified artificially.
A lawyer can explain that a government agency has asked a reasonable question without portraying the agency as an enemy.
A lawyer can describe an unusual procedural situation without transforming it into a crisis.
And a law firm can occasionally allow readers to smile while they learn something legally useful.
That is not necessarily a departure from professional communication.
It may be an unusually effective form of it.
6. Deadpan as a Legal Voice
Deadpan humor presents an especially interesting case.
It is almost paradoxically suited to legal writing.
The defining characteristic of deadpan is not the joke but the refusal to acknowledge it.
An improbable event is described in the same register as an ordinary one. The narrator remains composed. No linguistic signal instructs the reader to laugh. The humor emerges from the distance between the seriousness of the voice and the strangeness of what the voice is describing.
Lawyers may recognize something familiar in that structure.
Legal writing routinely requires extraordinary human behavior to be described in controlled language.
A bizarre factual sequence becomes a statement of facts.
An emotionally charged dispute becomes a procedural history.
An astonishing decision becomes an issue for review.
The discipline of legal narration already requires a certain distance between event and voice.
Deadpan simply exploits that distance for a different rhetorical effect.
The narrator does not leave the room
What makes deadpan potentially useful in a professional article is that the legal narrator never has to abandon professional control.
The writer does not stop the analysis to tell a joke.
The writer continues describing the facts.
Suppose, for example, that an administrative authority identifies a series of transactions that appear inconsistent with a taxpayer’s declared professional activity.
The authority asks for an explanation.
The taxpayer provides one.
The explanation happens to involve an unusual privately owned vehicle, a specialized foreign supplier, and a collection of mechanical parts whose relationship with the taxpayer’s profession is, at first sight, difficult to establish.
Nothing requires the narrator to say that the situation is amusing.
The legal questions remain entirely conventional: What do the transactions represent? Are they professional or private? What inference can reasonably be drawn from the available data? What evidence resolves the discrepancy?
The unusual facts simply make those questions more memorable.
Fiction, reconstruction, and professional boundaries
Deadpan also works particularly well with hypothetical or openly fictionalized legal narratives.
This distinction matters professionally.
A lawyer should be cautious about transforming a client’s genuine difficulty into entertainment, even when identifying details have been removed. Confidentiality is only one consideration. Professional trust is another.
A fictional case creates different possibilities.
Facts can be exaggerated, rearranged, or combined to illuminate a legal problem. Dialogue can be constructed to expose the logic of competing positions. An improbable detail can be introduced precisely because it makes an abstract concept easier to remember.
The reader should know the nature of the exercise.
Once that boundary is clear, fiction can become a legitimate form of legal explanation rather than an attempt to pass invention off as precedent or experience.
There is also an intermediate form: the composite hypothetical.
Lawyers encounter recurring patterns across multiple matters. Elements from those patterns can be combined into a fictional scenario that corresponds exactly to no individual client while remaining professionally recognizable.
This has long been one of the strengths of hypothetical reasoning in legal education.
A professional article can use the same technique.
When deadpan fails
None of this means that deadpan is universally appropriate.
Its very ambiguity creates risk.
A reader may not recognize the irony.
A person involved in a similar real-world situation may believe the writer is trivializing it.
A sentence removed from context may appear to make a factual assertion that the complete article clearly treats as fictional.
And humor that depends upon making another person appear incompetent can quickly become unprofessional rather than sophisticated.
The technique therefore works best when the underlying legal analysis remains unmistakably serious and the target of the humor, if there is one at all, is the incongruity of the situation.
In that sense, deadpan provides an unusually clear test of professional voice.
The lawyer must know exactly what is serious before deciding what can safely be funny.
Professional personality works best when it rests on professional control.
That brings us back to the broader question of legal language.
If conversational writing, narrative, and even humor can coexist with legal authority, should traditional technical language simply disappear?
No.
Technical language still has a job.
7. Technical Language Still Has a Job
The case against legalese can sometimes become too easy.
Once unnecessary complexity has been identified as a problem, there is a temptation to treat every traditional expression, technical term, or Latin phrase as evidence that lawyers have failed to modernize.
That conclusion goes too far.
Law is not merely an activity conducted by lawyers. It is also a system of concepts.
Those concepts require names.
Some legal terms carry meanings that ordinary language can approximate but not reproduce with the same precision. Others locate an argument within a doctrinal tradition. A short expression may incorporate distinctions that would otherwise require several sentences to explain.
This is true in every technical discipline.
Medicine does not improve communication by eliminating medical terminology.
Engineering does not become more accessible by pretending that specialized concepts have no specialized names.
Law should not aspire to become technically vocabulary-free either.
The problem begins somewhere else.
Technical language is useful when it carries information. It becomes legalese when it carries mostly atmosphere.
Latin is an unusually good test
Latin provides an almost perfect illustration because it can perform several very different functions.
A Latin expression may identify a recognized legal principle.
It may provide a concise reference to a doctrinal tradition shared by lawyers across jurisdictions.
It may occasionally express an idea more economically than its translation.
Or it may simply make a sentence look more legal.
Pacta sunt servanda is a familiar example.
The proposition can certainly be expressed in English. Agreements are to be kept. Contracts must be honored. Parties are bound by their agreements.
But the Latin expression does more than save words when it is used in an appropriate doctrinal context. It identifies a principle with a history and a recognized place in legal reasoning.
That does not mean it should be inserted into every discussion of contractual performance.
It means that its usefulness depends upon what the writer is trying to accomplish.
The same principle applies to terms of art in English.
A lawyer should not replace a precise legal concept with an approximate everyday expression merely to demonstrate commitment to plain language.
Sometimes the technical term is the plainest accurate term available.
Translation can demonstrate mastery
The more interesting professional skill is the ability to move in both directions.
A lawyer can state the technical proposition and then translate its consequence into ordinary language.
This is particularly powerful in oral advocacy.
An advocate may identify the doctrine that governs the issue and then, almost immediately, reduce the dispute to its practical logic:
In technical terms, the doctrine is this. In practical terms, the other party cannot rely on a problem that it created itself.
The second sentence does not replace the first.
Nor is the first merely decorative.
Together they communicate at two levels.
The technical formulation tells the court where the argument belongs within the law.
The ordinary formulation tells the court why the argument makes sense.
This ability to change register is especially valuable in litigation because legal persuasion operates simultaneously through doctrine and comprehension.
A technically impeccable argument that cannot be followed is not necessarily persuasive.
An intuitively attractive argument that cannot be located within the law is not enough either.
The advocate needs both.
Knowing the code without hiding behind it
Technical vocabulary also has a social function that plain-language discussions sometimes underestimate.
Professional communities communicate partly through shared codes.
Knowing those codes can signal competence.
A correctly used term of art, a doctrinal reference, or even a Latin principle may communicate to another lawyer or a judge that the speaker recognizes the legal structure of the problem.
There is nothing inherently illegitimate about that.
Authority is part of professional communication.
The difficulty arises when the signal substitutes for the substance.
A lawyer who knows the expression but cannot explain the principle has demonstrated familiarity with the code, not necessarily mastery of the law.
A lawyer who can use the expression, explain the doctrine, apply it to the facts, and then restate the entire proposition in ordinary language demonstrates something considerably more valuable.
The objective is not to stop speaking the language of law.
It is to stop hiding behind it.
8. Authority Without Obscurity
This brings the discussion back to professional authority.
Lawyers do not communicate through words alone.
Professional authority is constructed through many signals: credentials, institutional position, experience, appearance, confidence, fluency, responsiveness, command of the record, and the ability to answer an unexpected question.
Language is one of those signals.
But it is an unusually revealing one.
A highly formal style can initially create an impression of expertise. Technical terminology can reinforce it. Traditional formulas can make a document look unmistakably legal.
None of those signals is necessarily false.
But they are inexpensive signals.
The more demanding test arrives when the script is interrupted.
A judge asks a question that was not anticipated.
A client does not understand the explanation.
An opposing argument changes the structure of the dispute.
Someone asks the lawyer to explain, in one sentence, what the case is really about.
At that point, authority depends less upon sounding like a lawyer and more upon thinking like one.
Clarity can be a display of confidence
There is an old professional temptation to make expertise visible through complexity.
The more difficult the language, the more specialized the speaker appears.
Plain-language advocates challenge that assumption by reversing it.
Perhaps the greater display of expertise is the ability to make a difficult proposition understandable without making it inaccurate.
That requires confidence.
The lawyer must know which distinctions are essential and which are merely inherited linguistic habits.
The lawyer must know what can be translated and what would be damaged by translation.
And the lawyer must be sufficiently secure in professional authority not to require every sentence to advertise it.
This does not produce a lawyer who always sounds informal.
It produces a lawyer who can choose.
Formal when formality serves the occasion.
Technical when technical precision matters.
Conversational when the audience needs accessibility.
Direct when directness is more persuasive.
And occasionally humorous when humor illuminates rather than distracts.
Professional voice is not a single register. It is control over registers.
The performance of authority
This distinction becomes especially visible in advocacy.
Courtrooms inevitably contain an element of performance.
Lawyers stand, speak according to procedural conventions, address the court through established formulas, and present arguments within a highly structured institutional environment.
There is nothing artificial about that in itself.
Ritual helps institutions operate.
But performance and competence are not identical.
A polished advocate may be an excellent lawyer.
An unpolished advocate may be an excellent lawyer.
Appearance can provide information, but it is incomplete information.
The same is true of language.
A lawyer can sound authoritative without possessing much authority over the underlying problem.
Another can speak with remarkable simplicity because the complexity has already been resolved internally.
The difference often becomes visible only when something unexpected happens.
This is one reason the ability to move between technical and ordinary language can be so persuasive.
It suggests that the lawyer is not reciting a formulation.
The lawyer owns the argument.
Plain language is not plain thinking
Perhaps the greatest misconception surrounding plain legal language is that intellectual sophistication must somehow remain visible on the surface of the prose.
It does not.
A simple sentence may be the final product of complicated analysis.
In fact, simplicity often comes at the end rather than the beginning.
The lawyer researches the authorities.
Identifies the competing doctrines.
Separates relevant facts from distracting ones.
Tests alternative interpretations.
And only then discovers that the central proposition can be expressed in twelve words.
Those twelve words are not evidence that the analysis was simple.
They may be evidence that the analysis is finished.
American legal communication’s movement away from unnecessary legalese can therefore be understood not as a rejection of professional authority, but as a different theory of where authority comes from.
Not obscurity.
Not ritual for its own sake.
Not vocabulary as costume.
But command of the subject and control over its communication.
That development has acquired a new significance in recent years.
Lawyers are no longer writing only for judges, clients, other lawyers, or members of the public.
Increasingly, another reader stands between the lawyer and the human audience.
A machine.
9. Writing for Humans — and Machines
For most of legal history, the intended reader was relatively easy to identify.
A lawyer wrote for a court.
For another lawyer.
For a client.
For a public authority.
Or, in academic and professional publishing, for other members of the legal community.
The digital environment changed that relationship once.
Search engines changed it again.
Artificial intelligence may now be changing it for a third time.
A growing proportion of legal information is no longer discovered because a reader navigates directly to a law firm’s website and chooses an article from a list. The reader asks a question elsewhere.
A search engine identifies potentially relevant material.
An AI system may retrieve it, interpret it, compare it with other sources, and produce a new answer.
The lawyer’s writing therefore has a new potential reader.
Not necessarily the final reader, but an intermediary one.
The machine has to understand what the lawyer means
This development creates an unexpected connection with the plain-language movement.
For decades, lawyers have been encouraged to write clearly because human readers benefit from clarity.
Now clarity may also affect whether machines can correctly identify and represent what lawyers have written.
The problem is not that artificial intelligence requires elementary vocabulary.
It does not.
Technical legal terminology can be extremely useful because it identifies concepts precisely. A system attempting to understand an article about res judicata, summary judgment, discovery, or fiduciary duties benefits from explicit terminology just as a human researcher does.
The difficulty arises when the relationship between those concepts is obscured by unnecessary complexity.
If the central proposition is buried beneath ceremonial language, excessive qualification, vague references, or paragraphs that never state directly what they are about, a machine faces a version of the same problem faced by a human reader.
It must reconstruct the author’s meaning.
Sometimes it will reconstruct it correctly.
Sometimes it will not.
From search engine optimization to semantic clarity
For years, online legal publishing was heavily influenced by search engine optimization.
This sometimes produced an unfortunate style of writing.
Keywords were repeated because search engines were expected to reward repetition. Articles were designed around phrases that people might type into a search box. The resulting prose could satisfy an optimization strategy while sounding unnatural to almost everyone else.
AI-mediated search creates a somewhat different problem.
A system answering a natural-language question needs more than the repeated presence of a keyword.
It needs to identify propositions.
It needs to understand relationships.
It needs to distinguish a rule from an example, an exception from a general principle, and a factual narrative from the legal conclusion drawn from it.
In other words, some of the qualities traditionally associated with good human writing become increasingly important in machine-mediated discovery as well.
Clear headings.
Explicit propositions.
Logical structure.
Consistent terminology.
Natural language.
And enough context to establish what a statement actually means.
This does not eliminate SEO.
It changes the nature of the optimization problem.
The objective is increasingly not merely to make a document discoverable, but to make its meaning recoverable.
Conversational does not mean semantically vague
This creates another apparent paradox.
A conversational legal article may actually be easier for a machine to interpret than a highly formal one.
Not because machines appreciate informality.
But because good conversational writing often makes relationships explicit.
It asks a question and answers it.
It identifies the problem before discussing the solution.
It uses examples to establish context.
It tells the reader why a distinction matters.
And it tends to state important conclusions directly.
A recent ABA discussion of AI search and law firm SEO reflects this emerging reality: law firms increasingly need content that is authoritative and technically accurate but also sufficiently clear, structured, and natural to be interpreted, summarized, and surfaced by AI systems.
The development is significant because it brings two previously separate conversations together.
The plain-language movement asked lawyers to consider the human reader.
Modern digital publishing asked lawyers to consider the search engine.
AI-mediated legal information increasingly requires lawyers to consider both at the same time.
What happens to voice?
There is, however, a danger in taking this logic too far.
If lawyers begin writing primarily for machines, legal publishing may acquire a new form of artificiality.
Old legalese could simply be replaced by new machine-oriented prose.
Every heading becomes a question.
Every paragraph becomes an answer.
Every article follows the same predictable architecture.
Every law firm sounds like every other law firm because all of them are trying to become maximally extractable.
That would solve one communication problem by creating another.
Professional voice still matters.
So do narrative, rhythm, argument, judgment, and occasionally humor.
A memorable article does not need to resemble a database entry merely because a machine may eventually read it.
The challenge is more interesting:
Can legal writing remain recognizably human while becoming increasingly intelligible to machines?
There is good reason to think that it can.
In fact, the qualities that make strong legal writing valuable to humans — structure, precision, explicit reasoning, contextual explanation — are often the same qualities that make its meaning easier for machines to recover.
The lawyer therefore does not necessarily need to choose between the two audiences.
The lawyer needs to know what is being said clearly enough that both can follow it.
10. Knowing When to Sound Like a Lawyer
Perhaps lawyers have been asking the wrong question.
The debate is often presented as a choice.
Traditional legal language or plain language.
Formality or accessibility.
Technical precision or conversational writing.
Professional authority or personality.
Seriousness or humor.
Those alternatives are unnecessarily rigid.
Legal communication is not a single activity, and professional competence does not require a single voice.
A lawyer may write a highly technical appellate brief in the morning, explain the same dispute to a client in ordinary language before lunch, and publish an article about the underlying legal problem in a conversational voice that afternoon.
The law has not changed between those three communications.
The audience has.
The purpose has.
The voice should be capable of changing with them.
Legal language is a tool, not a costume
There is no reason to abandon the specialized language of law when it performs useful work.
Terms of art remain terms of art.
Doctrinal precision remains necessary.
Traditional principles can still provide intellectual structure and historical continuity.
Even Latin occasionally survives for perfectly respectable reasons.
But none of those things needs to become a costume that the lawyer wears in every communicative setting.
A professional vocabulary demonstrates its value through function.
When it makes an idea more precise, use it.
When it identifies a doctrine efficiently, use it.
When it allows lawyers to communicate through a shared technical code, use it.
When it merely makes an ordinary proposition sound more legal, perhaps do not.
The same functional test applies to informality.
A conversational voice is not inherently superior.
Humor is not evidence of modernity.
Storytelling is not appropriate merely because readers like stories.
Every technique needs a reason.
Authority may sound different now
What appears to be changing in American legal communication is not the disappearance of professional authority but some of its linguistic signals.
A lawyer no longer needs to demonstrate expertise by making expertise difficult to access.
A law firm does not necessarily become less serious because its articles sound as though they were written by identifiable human beings.
A judge does not necessarily receive greater respect from a sentence because the sentence contains forty-seven words.
And a client does not need to be impressed by terminology that the lawyer could have explained.
Authority can emerge from something more demanding:
knowing the law;
knowing the audience;
knowing what must remain technical;
knowing what can be made simple;
and knowing when a distinctive voice helps rather than interferes.
The lawyer who can change registers
The strongest legal communicator may therefore be neither the lawyer who always sounds traditional nor the lawyer who never does.
It may be the lawyer who can move deliberately between registers.
Who can use the doctrinal term and explain it.
Who can write formally without becoming obscure.
Who can write conversationally without becoming imprecise.
Who can tell a story without confusing narrative with evidence.
Who can occasionally be funny without needing someone else to become the joke.
And who can write clearly enough that a human reader understands the argument even if a machine helped that reader find it.
This is not a rejection of the traditional legal voice.
It is a broader conception of professional voice.
The future of legal communication is unlikely to belong to lawyers who never sound like lawyers.
Nor will it belong to those who always do.
Professional authority increasingly lies somewhere else: in knowing the difference.
Comparative perspective: this article examines legal communication primarily from the perspective of American professional culture. A complementary analysis comparing these ideas with legal practice in Spain is available at EBAN Abogados: [¿Tiene un abogado que hablar como un abogado? La comunicación jurídica en España y USA].
