Beyond readability: What the SRA & Amplifi trial taught us about legal clarity

A Problem Hidden in Plain Text

What if your legal communications, despite being correct, compliant, and structured, still aren't understood?

That’s the uncomfortable truth many legal and compliance professionals face. The truth is what led the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to partner with Amplified Global for the first official project under its new Innovation Programme.

The project focused on a challenge that cuts through every regulated sector: “Can we measure and improve how legal information is understood by real people?”

The Project: Turning Intelligibility Into Evidence

Over three phases, 37 participants, including legal professionals, SRA staff, law students, and non-specialists, tested their understanding of complex regulatory content.

Each participant read real examples of SRA guidance, ranging from solicitor transparency rules to unbundling and freelance practice, and completed structured comprehension tasks. Alongside this, Amplifi’s platform assessed and simplified the documents, and a new Multi-Level Comprehension Framework was introduced to measure outcomes.

The aim was simple: not just to observe what’s hard to understand, but to provide a replicable method for improving it.  This involved using the intelligibility assessment and guided simplification to improve intelligibility - reducing complexity, and improving how clear and understandable the language was.  By doing so, the study aimed to test the role and value that intelligibility assessment techniques, like Amplifi, can bring to the legal sector.

What We Set Out to Test

This was more than a reading exercise. It was an investigation into how complexity affects comprehension and how technology can help solve it.

We asked:

• Do simplified legal texts improve understanding?
• Which aspects of legal drafting, structure, tone, and layout create the greatest barriers?
• Can frameworks and AI tools help us identify, measure, and simplify complexity in a way that stands up to regulatory scrutiny?

The outcome of the research will guide the creation of a blueprint for smarter, more intelligible communication across the legal sector.

Why This Matters Now

Legal teams are under growing pressure to ensure their content is accurate, fair, and to prove it’s understood. From the FCA’s Consumer Duty to the Consumer Rights Act, regulators are moving away from box-ticking and demanding evidence of real-world outcomes.

Yet traditional readability tools (like Flesch-Kincaid) don’t reflect how meaning is interpreted, or how information is applied to inform an action or decision.

That’s why the SRA took this issue head-on. And why Amplifi’s approach, grounded in legal context, behavioural research, and AI-powered assessment, is gaining traction.

What We Learned

1. Simpler Content Benefits Everyone

It’s easy to assume simplification is only needed for “lay readers.” But one of the most important findings was that everyone, from consumers to senior legal professionals, understood simplified content better. Legal expertise didn’t reduce the benefits. As one participant put it:

“I had to read the original document three or four times. The simplified one just made sense.”

2. Navigation and Structure Matter 

Yes, shorter sentences and clearer phrasing helped, but layout, headings, and document flow played an equally critical role. When structure improved, comprehension and reading speed followed.

3. Emotional Response Shapes Understanding

Participants described dense, complex guidance as “overwhelming” and “fatiguing”, affecting how deeply they engaged. Simpler versions felt “helpful” and “clear.” And that emotional shift improved recall, interpretation, and action.

4. Intelligibility Can Be Measured

Using the Amplifi platform, the project was able to quantify improvement:

• 52% increase in intelligibility score for SRA’s Transparency guidance

• 24% drop in complex sentence use

• 36% increase in readability

• Reach (the percentage of adults likely to understand the text) improved from ~50% of UK adults to ~72%

The Amplifi Multi-Level Comprehension Framework© allowed the team to test evaluate comprehensive understanding, and a way to test the readers’ deeper engagement with the material.

The project used the full breadth of the Multi-Level Comprehension Framework to test readers’ comprehension against a range of levels.  These ranged from simple recall and understanding of the main message, to higher levels that allow the reader to apply the information. 

• Main Message – whether the reader understands the central idea and overall purpose.
• Basic Recall – whether the reader can recall key terms, facts, or information they’ve read.
• Inference – the ability to interpret meaning, and implicit messages, intentions or implications.
• Applied – whether the reader can apply the information to practical, real-world tasks or scenarios, or to inform a decision.
• Reflection – reflecting on the importance or impact of the content, and enable deeper analysis of the information.

In short, the Framework (c) measured what readers understand and how they could use it - reflecting the legal interpretation of intelligibility, and the requirement of the Consumer Duty.

Amplifi’s Role and What Changed After

Amplifi provided the assessment tooling and simplification engine, but also co-designed the testing model in collaboration with SRA, based on emerging regulatory and academic standards.

Importantly, some of the feedback collected during the trial from SRA editors directly influenced new platform features, such as more advanced governance tools, exclusions, and structured collaboration.

Looking Ahead: From One Trial to an Industry Standard

This was more than a one-off experiment.

• The SRA is already using the insights to improve its own guidance materials.
• Other legal regulators are now exploring similar trials.
• The Gambling Commission sent one of its policy team members to participate in the testing.
• Amplifi is building tools to allow in situ comprehension testing, so firms can assess understanding at the point of delivery.
  
  

And firms across legal, financial, and regulated sectors can now pilot this technology directly, using structured programmes supported by Amplifi’s team.

Closing Thought: A High Tide Floats All Boats

Simplification doesn’t mean reducing the information available to the reader. It means explaining issues in simpler, less complicated ways, so that rights, risks, and obligations can be understood, not just read.

As the legal sector faces increasing pressure to demonstrate fairness, accessibility, and transparency, intelligibility is no longer a “nice-to-have.” It’s part of your compliance infrastructure.

As one workshop lead put it: “When it comes to intelligibility, a high tide floats all boats.”