Rendering the complex clear

By Selwyn Parker

If one of Chapman Tripp's lawyers started a sentence with something like "notwithstanding prognostications to the contrary, as well as what has been stated, we heretofore express our considered opinion that subject to further qualification," he or she would have to come up before the firm's resident beak for breach of good English.

He's Alastair Carruthers who, as well as managing the firm, runs Chapman Tripp's "Project Clarity". This is a programme designed to get the lawyers to write stuff the rest of us can understand.

This is not just because Carruthers loves good writing, which he does. In the written word, he says, lie "great moments of truth".

It's also because there are fees in effective communication, surely one of the great tools of management. As Carruthers puts it: "The written word is one of the most tangible products for a knowledge business."

And wasn't it Dr Samuel Johnson who said: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money"?

This is why Chapman Tripp lawyers have to go to English boot camp.

Every one of them must do a 12-hour, three-part course in good writing devised by Carruthers, who has made a study of the subject here and in the United States. They are writing documents, he points out, that "will be read for years to come".

The documents concerned are mainly those that express advice or opinions for laypeople who can't tell the difference between a "notwithstanding" and a "heretofore" and don't give a damn, either.

Lawyers are of course notorious for writing obfuscating English, as though they are engaging in a communication to which only other lawyers are privy. It got so bad that in America several states, including New York, enacted plain English laws.

And in Britain a ginger group of lawyers formed their own group, called Clarity, to promote clearer, more understandable documents in a famously cautious profession.

As MacMillan's The Good English Guide notes: "Legal English is notorious for its long sentences because lawyers are concerned that all the qualifications, conditions and exceptions are contained in a single sentence, to avoid loopholes."

Damn the loopholes, says Britain's National Consumer Council - which recommends that lawyers keep their sentences shorter than 25 words, brevity being one of the principles of clarity.

Even 25 words might be too long for Carruthers. He showed me a document about an Employment Court dispute in which the first sentence was a yawn-making 45 words that, yes, tried to cover every loophole.

But that was before editing. In the much snappier, edited version, the opening sentence had been chopped to eight simple, jargon-free words which would have made the client sit straight up in his chair.

Carruther's preoccupation with good writing may have something to do with the fact that he's not a lawyer and arrived at Chapman Tripp very much from left field.

"My CV presents a bewildering series of 90-degree turns," he says.

He trained as a musician - principally in composition and flute - and studied languages. Although he has done post-graduate courses in writing, psychology, strategic planning and organisational development, he does not have an MBA and seems quite proud of it.

Carruthers' first writing job came at the age of 24, when he wrote speeches for then Education Minister Phil Goff. Now 34, he seems to have gone on from there, honing his principles of good writing.

Perhaps the most important of these is: "There's no really great writing, only great re-writing. It's through editing that you create a really great product."

His own reading is rather eclectic. Currrently it includes Isaiah Berlin's Crooked Timber of Humanity, Lord of the Rings, and Secrets and Lies, about the Timberland controversy.

Clearly, quite a few lawyers do know how to write. They include John Grisham and Scott Turow, to name two American best-selling authors, and John Mortimer QC, creator of Rumpole of The Bailey. Closer to home there's Jack Hodder, editor of The Capital Letter and a senior partner in litigation with Chapman Tripp.

Still, there's always a lot of things for lawyers to learn at Project Clarity's three courses.

"The classic long legal sentence opens with the main idea, runs into subordinate clauses, contains lots of 'notwithstandings' and many references to cases in Australia and New Zealand, and then gets to the point, which is the advice, in the last few words," explains Carruthers.

This just won't do, so Chapman Tripp's lawyers get their stuff cheerfully torn apart in Project Clarity.

"It's a much greater art to render the complex clear," observes Carruthers. He doesn't teach plain English because it is impossible to avoid technical language.

And anyway, good English is rarely plain.

For those interested in improving their communication with staff and clients, here are a few of Carruthers' tips.

* Above all, write for your readers.

* Be grammatically correct - "if you don't know what makes the parts of a sentence, you don't know how to clean it up."

* Liberate your nouns, strong verbs being better than weak nouns. For example, "we have decided" is much preferable to "we have come to a decision." That's why Carruthers thinks the quick brown fox should have hurdled the lazy dog.