Readable or intelligible: does it matter for the legal profession?

In recent years there has been a growing focus in the legal sector on making sure that consumer-facing comms are understandable.

There is a legal requirement that consumer comms are able to be understood, and the information acted upon. Too often this simply isn’t achieved.  

This issue is now firmly under the spotlight. 

The Gambling Commission has focused on the need for more understandable terms.  The FCA too via its new Consumer Duty.  And the Competition and Markets Authority is gaining new powers to police the Consumer Rights Act.  The risk of being fined 10% of global turnover tends to focus the mind!

These factors are forcing the legal teams that draft and sign off consumer communications to reconsider how understandable their work is to an average customer.  This is true whether it’s product information, terms and conditions, employment policies - the list is endless.

Yet the very language being used to describe the issue can be confusing.  Are we focused on readability, or intelligibility?  And what’s the difference?

The term ‘readable’ has little basis in law, yet it has been the focus of assessment tools like the Flesch Kincaid method for decades.  As a measure based only on sentence word length, in practice it is a poor judge of whether the text is actually able to be understood, and that information used.  

Documents can be as short and punchy as you like.  But if the words and concepts are unusual, or not commonly understood, the barrier to consumer understanding will still exist.

New tools like Amplifi are now able to delve much deeper, assessing a range of factors.  Not only classical and grammatical metrics like Flesch Kincaid, but also to assess how understandable the words and concepts being used are.

This provides a much deeper level of analysis of whether something is truly ‘intelligible’ – i.e., whether the meaning is understandable, and will provide information that a consumer can then use effectively.

It is the need for intelligibility that lies at the heart of regulation and law, in the UK and beyond.  Grammatical ‘readability’ alone is not sufficient, and the focus on tools like Flesch Kincaid as a way to measure intelligibility leaves legal teams, their clients, and the consumer at significant risk. Yet too often it is the crutch that legal teams rely on.

Readability alone is not enough – and it’s about time we took that lesson to heart.  Let’s focus on intelligibility, and ensure that consumers across all sectors are properly engaged, and informed in a way that they can fully understand.