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In August 2025, ISO issued the long-awaited standard on plain language in legal communication: ISO 24495-2, Plain language. Part 2: Legal communication (https://www.iso.org/standard/85774.html 13+V pp., 98 CHF), which represents the first attempt to define international guidelines on the clarity of legal texts. following the general standard ISO 24495-1, Plain language. Part 1: Governing principles and guidelines, released in 2023 (https://www.iso.org/standard/78907.html, 98 CHF) and later adopted and translated by UNI: UNI ISO 24495-1:2024, Linguaggio chiaro – Parte 1: Principi e linee guida (https://store.uni.com/uni-iso-24495-1-2024, 14+IV pp., 60 €).

Before getting into the details, it must be noted that if there is an international standard, then there is an international problem. ISO’s decision to address the issue of legal communication is significant: it establishes that the opacity of legal language is not a phenomenon confined to individual jurisdictions, but a global problem with significant social and economic consequences.

Aim and Structure

The problem and the aim of the standard are crystal clear and perfectly reasonable: “Good legal communication reduces costs, increases efficiency and improves effectiveness and compliance.”

The standard adopts the structure of the parent standard, which in turn adopts the structure of the W3C guidelines—particularly the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG, https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/): principles and guidelines, precisely.

The four principles are:

1. Readers get what they need (relevant)
2. Readers can easily find what they need (findable)
3. Readers can easily understand what they find (understandable)
4. Readers can easily use the information (usable)

Key Guidelines

Principle 1

• Authors should consider who needs to be involved in the writing process. Legal professionals should work closely with experts from the start of the writing process. This work can involve experts in plain language, legal design, legislative drafting and the subject matter.
• Authors should consider providing information in layers, with each having a specific reader or purpose. This way they can avoid having different versions of the same document for different readers. Examples of layers: columns, notes, graphics.

Principle 2

• Write statements or question-style headings.
• Avoid legal terms of art in headings.
• Authors should consider adding a concise introduction at the beginning of the document and each section.
• Authors should consider the risks of readers missing important information. Authors should not leave out any content that readers need to know. They should identify which information they need to highlight to make it easy to find
• Minimize the need for knowledge of other documents.

Principle 3

• Use words and expressions that are familiar to the intended audiences.
• Use common words where they are compatible with the need for legal clarity.
• Use plain language equivalents instead of archaic legal terms such as “res ipsa loquitur” and “heretofore”.
• Define or explain words and phrases when their common meaning differs from the way they are used in a legal document.
• Define or explain legal terms of art.
• Use graphics where they clarify content (eg. flowcharts to explain complex processes).
• Eliminate ambiguity.

Principle 4 (identical to the parent standard)

• Evaluate the document continually as it is developed.
• Evaluate the document further with readers.
• Continue to evaluate readers’ use of the document.

The Prevalence of “Communication”

While acknowledging the value of the initiative, I must point out some generalities that may limit its applicability and utility.

Within the standard, the terms communication, legal, and legal language are not well harmonized: the first dominates the others. 

Communication over Legal. First, the standard does not distinguish between different types of legal texts: it claims to apply equally to a regulatory measure, a contract, a court filing, a corporate policy, etc.

However, different legal texts do not share the same structure, the same style, the same purpose, the same audience, nor are they written by legal professionals with the same specific expertise. The first to object, rightly or strategically, will be jurists themselves, i.e., the very professionals who should comply with the standard. “This doesn’t apply to my case, for this, this, and a thousand other reasons,” they will say.

Second, the standard expects texts to satisfy both expert readers (e.g., judges) and non-expert readers (e.g., a client).

This guidance seems realistic only for certain texts, but it is hardly applicable to documents intended for a specialized audience, which require technical rigor and conciseness. In other words, it could be applied to texts that have no legal value, such as a company policy, or to texts that do have legal value but are aimed at a non-expert reader, such as a contract.

However, the goal of making texts that have legal value addressed to specialized audiences, such as court filing, clear also to non-expert readers does not seem likely to win the favor of legal professionals. In fact, their texts would:

• become much longer (in Italy and elsewhere, lawyers’ court filings are subject to length limits);
• contain non technical expressions that could conflict with technical ones and be open to multiple interpretations;
• expose the lawyer to the risk of appearing foolish for explaining to an expert reader things that are already perfectly obvious.

Communication over Legal Language. Finally, legal language is essentially absent from the standard, except for a few examples. There is not a single guideline addressing a feature unique to legal language or to the typical structure of legal texts.

The guidelines could apply to any specialized language. If ‘legal’ were replaced with ‘financial’, virtually nothing would change. As it stands, this standard is a valid model for the simplification of all specialized languages.

However, legal communication has particular importance, which would require a more detailed discussion.

From my side, I can contribute a couple of examples of Italian legal texts.

In legislative acts, the grounds precede the operative part, which ends up at the bottom of texts that are sometimes very long. This is done by convention. If the order of this information were reversed, nothing would change, except that the readers would immediately see what they are required to do.

The style of legal pleadings and judgments is characterized by excessively long sentences, within which there is an excessive frequency of parenthetical insertions: one every 29 words in lawyers’ pleadings and one every 47 words in judges’ decisions (according to my specific research, currently being published in the book Sinteticità e chiarezza degli atti processuali – Conciseness and Clarity of Court Filings).

Nevertheless, this standard undeniably raises the level of attention on a real issue that has distorting effects on the social and productive system. It also represents a turning point: for the first time, ISO has formally recognized the need for standards on clarity in legal language.

The UNI Standard on Professional Writing

For once, things are not so bad for Italians. We have our own UNI standard on professional writing, which provides scientifically rigorous, concrete, usable (indeed, already used) solutions, validated by professional writers for over a decade.

This is UNI 11482:2013, Structural elements and linguistic aspects of written organizational communications (https://store.uni.com/p/UNI21011931/uni-114822013-112397/UNI21011931_EIT, 16+IV pp., 40 €).

The UNI standard does not concern legal language, nor any particular type of specialized language: it defines clarity and indicates how to harmonize all the elements that make up a text so that it is clear. It is therefore applicable to any text, to any specialized language, including legal ones. To this end, the standard addresses text structure and linguistic formulation separately.

Regarding structure, it describes various elements of the text (and how to compose them):

Regarding language, the standard sets out precise parameters and indicators of clarity. For example:

Let us take, for example, a passage from a lawyer’s court filing rewritten in accordance with the standard:

Let us compare the differences:

In less technical legal texts intended for non-expert readers, such as corporate policies, following these “rules” results in an average 30% reduction in word count. This translates into a 30% saving of readers’ time. And time costs money. Based on ISTAT data and some projections drawn from my field experience, it turns out that the cost of communication in Italy amounts to €56.8 billion (4 percentage points of GDP). In fact:

• There are 8.4 million employees involved in reading within organizations (excluding citizens and clients);
• Each employee spends one hour per day reading, totaling 240 hours per year;
• The labor cost is € 28.2 per hour;
• 8.4 million × 240 × 28.2 = € 56.8 billion.

As for legislation, if written clearly it would increase GDP by 5%, according to Luigi Guiso, Massimo Morelli, Tommaso Giommoni, Claudio Michelacci, The economic costs of ambiguous laws (Bocconi University, Baffi Centre Research Paper no. 248, June 18, 2025, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5309098).

That confirms that the goal of the ISO standard is critically important: “Good legal communication reduces costs, increases efficiency and improves effectiveness and compliance”.

The final question is: how is it possible, at an international level, to integrate global guidelines with the regulatory and linguistic specificities of each country in order to provide useful and practical support, as well as a reliable reference?