The plain legal language movement has a long history. Early publications include Language of the law by David Mellinkoff in 1963 and Plain English for lawyers by Richard Wydick in 1979. In 1983, Clarity was established as an international association promoting plain legal language.

From these beginnings, lawyers and governments have increasingly embraced plain legal language. Many countries and states now have rules and guidelines around the use of plain language in contracts, insurance policies and government regulations. Law courses in universities include instruction on how to achieve plain legal writing.

Tips to achieving plain legal language include the following:

• Ask yourself whether a technical or archaic term that you are using has a particular meaning that cannot be conveyed with a more common term; if not, use the simpler term (eg due to the fact that can be replaced with because). (See Remove unnecessary words for more information on how to identify and eliminate wordiness.)
• Replace double negatives with single positives (eg replace not insubstantial with substantial and not unlikely with likely).
• Do not insert definitions when they are not necessary (eg if the document defines a week as the usual calendar week of 7 days, do not specify this).
• Pay attention to sentence length and structure and grammar and punctuation, to ensure that your meaning is clear.
• Carefully check your work. You can take a break from it before reading it again, or ask a colleague to read it to ensure that it is clear and unambiguous. Reading your work aloud is a good way to see if each sentence is as clear as it can be.

David Kelly, a Melbourne lawyer working with the Victorian Law Reform Commission, provides an example of how plain language can improve legal writing in the Takeovers code:

See Clear and appropriate language for more information on writing clearly, and Sentence length for more tips on breaking up sentences.