Interlude
Legal Information Can Be Understandable, Too
Legal information abounds on the Internet – and in intranets and extranets. Many web sites need a page about privacy policies. Many include terms of use. And some sites focus on legal issues and legal documents. Letting go of the words and writing in plain language are as applicable to legal information as to other web content.
Information can be legally accurate, legally sufficient, and also clear. In fact, these attributes support each other, and many sites now strive to write their legal pages in clear, simple language.
The typical problems in legal information online can be solved without compromising the legal standing of the information. These problems include:
Ironically, some web sites have poor headings followed by good writing in their legal information while others have good headings followed by poor writing. Let’s put the good headings and good writing together to have legal information that works for both your site visitors and your organization’s lawyers.
Make the information legible
You may think, “no one reads the legal stuff anyway, so it doesn’t matter what we do,” but that violates both the spirit and the letter of the requirement that you provide information about terms of use or about privacy. Instead of burying information in a small box that people have to scroll through, give people a link to a full page where they can enlarge the type if they need to.
Make sure your legal information prints well
It surprises me that sites offer printer-friendly options for most of their information but don’t do the same on the web pages with their terms of use or privacy policies. Why not? Legal information is important. People may want to print it.
Remember that you may have site visitors in many countries and that outside of the United States many people print on A4 paper, which is longer and narrower than the 8½ by 11 inch paper that is the U. S. standard. Remember that your site must print from many different computer configurations, including old operating systems and browsers.
Use site visitors’ words in your headings
Clear headings improve (and do not compromise) the legality of legal information. You can have questions or statements as headings in legal information; they are just as legal as noun-based headings.
Compare the headings in Figure Interlude 2-1 from the International Herald Tribune and Figure Interlude 2-2 from Gap. Which set is more inviting? Which better matches what you would want to know about a company’s privacy policies?
Figure Interlude 2-1 These headings don’t connect to the questions that most people have about a company’s privacy policies.
Avoid archaic legal language
Many words and phrases that we find in legal information in English just seem to shout “This is legal stuff. You won’t understand it.” Phrases like “to wit,” “the said example,” and “heretofore” were plain language hundreds of years ago. People actually talked that way, so reading those words was easy for people – then. But language changes over time. Words come into the language. Words leave the language. Those words – and many other “legalisms” – have left our everyday language. We see them only in legal information. We don’t talk that way now, so reading those words is not easy for your site visitors. Leave them out or replace them with common English words.
Figure Interlude 2-3 shows you part of a list of words to avoid from the U. S. Federal Register’s Drafting Legal Documents.
For example, the sentence with “pursuant to” and “hereinafter” in Figure Interlude 2-4 is not necessary. Most web sites (from Italy and from other countries) don’t cite the law in their privacy policies.
For more on writing legal information clearly, see www.plainlanguage.gov.
Figure Interlude 2-3 Words like the ones in this list are no longer part of our common speech. You can write clear legal information without using these words.
Apply all the clear writing techniques to your legal information
You can use personal pronouns in legal information. (Consider the agreements you sign for credit cards, cell phones, cable service, insurance, and so on. Almost all of them use “we” and “you.”)
You can write legal information with short, active sentences; with lists; and with tables. You can break legal information into short pieces, and each piece can still be a viable legal policy. You can give examples in legal information, as you see in the International Herald Tribune’s definition of cookies (Figure Interlude 2-5).
Case Study Interlude 2-1: Putting it all together with an example that is both legal and clear: Privacy policies
In this case study, I use all the points in the interlude to draft basic privacy policies for a web site. You may need to modify the information in these paragraphs for your web site. You may need to add other paragraphs to cover situations that are special to your site. If you do, try to write in this same style – friendly, personal, clear, and also legal. And remember to use these same principles – and all the other guidelines in this book – for terms of use and all other legal information on your web site.
