Plain English in legal writing: sentences that do their job
Legal writing earned its reputation for impenetrability honestly, over centuries. Modern Australian practice has turned against it: courts, legislative drafting offices and firm style guides now push consistently toward plain language, and student writing is marked to the modern standard, not the antique one. Plain does not mean informal; the formality rules of written legal English apply in full, and the register page covers them. Plain means the sentence delivers its meaning on first reading.
For second-language writers this shift is genuinely good news. The plain version of a sentence is also the version your grammar is least likely to break, because every structure you remove is a structure that can no longer go wrong. The dense version is not the advanced version. It is just the riskier one.
One sentence, one job
The most common structural fault in student legal writing is the sentence doing three jobs at once. Compare:
Dense: "The respondent, notwithstanding the fact that the notice which was served by the applicant on 1 March had specified a period of fourteen days for the remediation of the defects, and despite repeated subsequent correspondence, failed to undertake any works."
Plain: "The applicant served a notice on 1 March. The notice gave the respondent fourteen days to remedy the defects. Despite repeated correspondence, the respondent did no work."
Every fact survived the rewrite. What died was the reader's struggle. The working test: when a sentence makes you hold its opening in memory while it detours through qualifications, it wanted to be two or three sentences. A more mechanical version of the same test: if you reach the main verb and have to look back to remember the subject, the sentence is overloaded.
One caution so the pendulum does not overswing: a page of uniformly short sentences reads as staccato, and some legal sentences legitimately need a subordinate clause to state a condition or exception. The rule is one job per sentence, not one clause per sentence.
Keep the actor next to the action
English readers parse a sentence by finding who did what, and legal sentences bury the "did" under stacked qualifications between subject and verb: "The guarantor, who had signed the deed at the second meeting, which took place after the loan had already been advanced, and who received no independent advice, now argues ..." By the time "argues" arrives, the subject is four clauses away. Move the qualifications out into their own sentences, or to the end, and keep subject and verb within arm's reach of each other. The information is identical; only the reader's working memory is spared.
The passive voice: a tool, not a sin
Blanket advice to avoid the passive is wrong for legal writing, and the real rule is more useful. The passive earns its place when:
- the actor is unknown or legally irrelevant: "the goods were damaged in transit";
- it keeps the paragraph's topic in subject position: in a paragraph about the notice, "the notice was served on 1 March" flows better than flipping to the server;
- the actor is obvious and naming it again is noise.
The passive hides the ball when the actor is exactly what the law cares about. "The contract was breached" omits the party whose liability you are analysing. "Obligations were not met" evades the entire question. In analysis, name the actor: the law attaches consequences to persons, and your sentences should attach actions to them. A quick audit: for each passive in an analytical paragraph, ask whether the reader needs to know who. If yes, rewrite it active.
If your first language marks politeness or formality by suppressing the agent of a sentence, audit your passives deliberately, because the habit transfers and English legal analysis wants the agent on the page.
Cut the padding
Some phrases add length and nothing else. The standard replacements:
| The long way round | The plain form |
|---|---|
| at this point in time | now |
| in the event that | if |
| prior to | before |
| subsequent to | after |
| for the purpose of establishing | to establish |
| in relation to / with respect to | about, on, of, or restructure the sentence |
| the fact that | usually deletable |
| each and every | every |
| null and void | void |
| due to the fact that | because |
Two caveats keep this honest. First, some paired phrases in old instruments are terms of art in their home documents; when you quote a contract or a will, you quote its words exactly as written, padding included. The cutting rule applies to your sentences, not the document's, and the line between the two is covered on the quoting and paraphrasing page. Second, "prior to" and "in relation to" are not errors; they are just longer. In a sentence already carrying real complexity, spend your reader's attention on the law, not the connectives.
Buried verbs
The other great inflator is the verb dressed up as a noun: "make an application" for "apply", "effect a termination" for "terminate". This pattern, nominalisation, has its own section on the register page, including the cases where the noun form is genuinely needed. The one-line version: keep a real verb when you are reporting who did what.
A worked paragraph
Before: "Consideration was given by the tribunal to the question of whether there had been compliance by the employer in relation to the notification requirements, and a determination was made to the effect that, due to the fact that notification had not been effected prior to the deadline, there had been a failure of compliance."
After: "The tribunal considered whether the employer had complied with the notification requirements. It found the employer had not complied, because it did not notify before the deadline."
The moves, one by one:
- "Consideration was given by the tribunal" becomes "The tribunal considered": the actor moves to the front and the buried verb comes back to life.
- "the question of whether there had been compliance by the employer" becomes "whether the employer had complied": the second buried verb revived, six words saved.
- "a determination was made to the effect that" becomes "It found": the passive that hid the tribunal, and the padding around it, both go.
- "due to the fact that notification had not been effected prior to the deadline" becomes "because it did not notify before the deadline": three padding phrases replaced by their plain forms in one clause.
- One sentence doing two jobs becomes two sentences doing one each.
Fifty-four words became twenty-seven, nothing legal was lost, and the actor is on the page in both sentences.
A self-check before you submit
- Find your three longest sentences. Apply the one-job test; split what fails it.
- In every analytical paragraph, check each passive: if the reader needs to know who, name the actor.
- Search for "prior to", "in the event that", "the fact that", "in relation to" and "due to the fact that". Replace or justify each.
- Read one page aloud. Wherever you run out of breath before the verb, restructure.
- Confirm anything inside quotation marks kept its original wording; the plain treatment is for your words only.
If you would like your own sentences checked, Legal Writing Lab is a free feedback tool for international law students writing Australian legal English. It flags clarity and register issues in your draft, explains each one, and never writes your work for you.