Contracts govern everyday life and remain famously unreadable to the people signing them. Legal theory has an explanation ready: law is a system built on expert knowledge of technical concepts, so difficulty is the price of precision. That predicts the trouble lies in the ideas. The alternative is that it lies in the sentences. So the authors measured a corpus of roughly 10 million words, and then tested readers.
The sentences, not the concepts. Contracts contained startlingly high proportions of difficult-to-process features relative to nine other genres of written and spoken English: low-frequency jargon, producing , passive voice structures and non-standard capitalization. Two experiments with 184 participants found excerpts carrying those features recalled and comprehended at lower rates, even by experienced readers.
Contracts have an ever-increasing presence in everyday life and remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. The question is why, and there are two candidate answers with very different implications. One locates the difficulty in specialized legal concepts, the other in how the sentences are built.
A of roughly 10 million words established the first half. Contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features relative to nine other baseline genres of written and spoken English: low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies, passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization.
Two experiments with 184 participants then tested whether those features matter for readers. Excerpts containing them were recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without them, and that held even for experienced readers. Center-embedded clauses inhibited recall more than the other features did.
The authors draw three conclusions. The findings undermine the of legal theory, according to which law is a system built on expert knowledge of technical concepts. They suggest the processing difficulty results largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies, which is to say poor writing, rather than from a lack of specialized legal knowledge. And they suggest that editing out the problematic features would be tractable and beneficial. Note the materials: excerpts, recall and comprehension, rather than whole agreements and real decisions.
wat. Contracts are hard because of nested clauses and jargon, and the same content written plainly was recalled better even by experienced readers.
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It makes the problem fixable. If difficulty came from technical concepts, nothing could be done without losing precision, and if it comes from center-embedded clauses then editing them out is both tractable and worth doing.
How do we know?
Martínez, Mollica and Gibson ran a corpus analysis of roughly 10 million words, comparing contracts against nine baseline genres. Two experiments with 184 participants then tested recall and comprehension of excerpts with and without those features.
What is still unknown
Two experiments with 184 participants on excerpts rather than whole agreements, measuring recall and comprehension rather than whether anybody signed something they regretted. Experienced readers were included and were not practicing lawyers throughout.
Learn something?
Where to next
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