Hate reading contracts? MIT study explains the real reason legal documents are so hard to understand

Legalese has been frustrating and intimidating anyone not in possession of a law degree since time immemorial. Marked by a cosmic gumbo of antiquated language, mind-numbing repetition, and dense blocks of clauses incepted into the middle of sentences, it’s a style of writing that shows up in almost no place other than the fine print. But why is the language in legal documents so consistently indigestible that many of us never fully read our own contracts? A new study from a team of cognitive scientists at MIT suggests that the confusing nature of legalese may serve a very specific purpose.

The first thing to know about legalese is that legal professionals tend not to be fans of it either. Sure enough, it was only after the MIT study’s lead author Eric Martinez earned a law degree at Harvard, spending years immersed in court filings, laws, deeds, and decrees, that he thought to focus on legalese as a topic. Since 2020, he has been researching this perplexing style of writing with Edward Gibson, an MIT professor who specializes in brain and cognitive sciences. In their most recent study into why legal documents are so often inscrutable, the team tested whether even nonlawyers would end up using legalese if asked to write legal documents.

The experiment tested out two theories: a) the “copy and edit” hypothesis, which posits that legal documents start off simply enough, until late-breaking info requires inserting lengthy definitions into the middle of sentences, creating what are called “center-embedded clauses,” and b) the “magic spell” hypothesis, which suggests that, much like the rhyming and pidgin Latin that are inherent to magic spells, people use legalese simply to broadcast a legal document’s “legal-ness.”

The researchers recruited 200 people without legal backgrounds to write laws prohibiting certain crimes, and also to later write stories about those laws. In order to also test the “copy and edit” hypothesis, half of those people were given additional context after writing their initial laws to test whether that would trigger more complex, center-embedded clauses. In the end, all subjects wrote their laws with complex, center-embedded clauses—which were absent from the stories they later wrote. The scientists concluded that convoluted legalese often acts as a way to convey authority.

Even lawyers hate legalese

Lead author Martinez isn’t the only legal professional turned off by this style of writing.

“Whenever pleadings start with ‘comes now,’ I sort of expect trumpets to herald whatever’s next,” says Jacqueline Schafer, former assistant attorney general in Alaska and Washington State, and founder of Clearbrief, a company that uses AI to make legal writing more efficient.

“The last time people spoke like this they were celebrating the first Thanksgiving,” says Vineet Dubey, cofounder and partner of Custodio & Dubey, the law firm that represents the L.A. Kings.

There is certainly reason to believe that at least part of the reason this style of writing still appears in legal documents is to convey authority. After all, what could feel more legally binding than a contract that’s impossible to decipher? Even some lawyers are willing to admit as much.

“What people most associate with the term ‘legalese’ is the belief that to be effective, legal language has to be complicated, containing terms like ‘thereto’ and all this other shit,” says Natela Shenon, a partner at Grant Shenon in Los Angeles. “That isn’t true, and it’s often overkill. Lawyers sometimes go overboard because they feel that they need to show that they’re worth their billable hours. They might believe that if the contract isn’t complicated enough, it somehow undermines their competency, or isn’t giving the client their money’s worth.”

Some might even weaponize legalese.

“There’s no doubt we live in a world where we’ve all been confronted with legal documents designed for intentional obfuscation,” Dubey says. “When it comes to user agreements or terms of use, where the company’s best interests are at heart, that’s when a wall of words may serve an intention to overwhelm or intimidate customers who might be unhappy, harmed, or wronged by the product or service. We’ve just seen Disney try to push this into uncharted territory.”

But very few lawyers would likely admit to deploying legalese strictly to sound authoritative, according to these experts. So, why do they all write that way?

It’s all in the fine print

One obvious reason is because legal documents cover complex concepts. The more complex an idea, the more specific and detailed lawyers have to be in their writing in order to capture all the nuances of that complexity and support it with correct terminology—not to mention relevant precedents and citations. The gold standard in court filings, according to Schaefer, is that every single sentence has a citation, either tied to the facts of the case or to a law it evokes.

The explicit demand for all those citations, which can make the visual experience of ingesting a legal document pure hell, helps support the “copy and edit” hypothesis.

“It’s sort of a necessary evil, when you’re drafting something for a court,” Schaefer says. “Some lawyers do start out just telling the story of their case when writing a brief, but then they have to go back and find the factual citations for every single fact they mentioned.”

As for the language that seems intended to project authority, perhaps the reason it sounds so unnaturally antiquated is because law is a profession that is resistant to change. Some terms have remained untouched since the invention of English Common Law hundreds of years ago. On a micro level, lawyers often adhere to precedent at their own firm; on a macro level, they often adhere to broader legal precedents that have held true for decades and sometimes even centuries.

“The whole foundation of our legal system is this idea of precedent, where we are incorporating statements from old court opinions,” Schaefer says. “When most lawyers sit down to write, we’re often working off of precedent, so we see a lot of the same phrasing and terminology get repeated and reincorporated over the generations of legal writing.”

Legal documents are intricate, beholden to precedent, and require precise language that often feels wildly outdated and inexplicably flecked with Latin. Although the stodginess of legalese may feel annoyingly affected or aggressively opaque, it may just be evidence of a legal professional sticking to the script. The client’s eyes glaze over, but the job gets done.

Will legal documents ever read closer to the way regular people write stories, and not laws? Probably not, unless enough local courts update their documents’ requirements. Or unless some force majeure event, including but not limited to acts of God, riots, war, fire, floods, accidents, strikes—you get the idea—reverts all legal writing precedent back to zero.