Plain legal language

I had an opportunity to dig down into the basic details of legal drafting in a training seminar organized by the Finnish Bar Association. A good crowd of both young and more experienced lawyers and attorneys from varying backgrounds attended both live and through webcast.

The ever increasing use of English language under Finnish law is one of my favorite topics. Although we copy common law drafting style, this adaptation of a foreign legal language seems not to create any major problems in practice even though we are clearly implementing more and more of common law interpretation of contract text even under Finnish law. In this process we should give a lot of attention to the drafting quality and consistency as many of the legal terms and concepts that we commonly use now do not perfectly translate into Finnish equivalents. And the parties may well understand the final wording ever so differently which in itself may cause problems later.

An alarming development is the creation of directly translated legal documents from the common law contract templates into Finnish – without any analysis or criticism or adaptation to the local practices. If we have an option, we should draft good Finnish, not poor Finglish.

I am a great fan of ”Plain English” being used in all contracts and would be happy to see also "Plain Finnish" being the idealistic objective of all of us lawyers. Legal documents should be clear, structured and logical, without adding anything that is not essential to their intended purpose!

All the recent and ever growing attention to "legal design" or the anticipated future of automated or robotized legal work and use of artificial intelligence only emphasizes the need of clear and logical text - be it English or Finnish.

Well, the truth is, that our everyday work is full of compromises and limited by time and resources. Perfect agreements are rare! A good agreement is enough, if it results in the agreed action - but does not need to be read again. When things go wrong for whatever reason - and sometimes they do - it is a pity if our client's ability to correct the situation or look for remedy is lost in the poor quality of the document we drafted.