What's it all about?
Our focus is practical techniques of how to use words, sentences and structure to transform legalese into plain language. We’ll start with how to plan and structure your legal content.
You’ll learn principles to:
Articulate the purpose and outcomes of the contract or other legal content
Focus on your readers – explore ideas of legal literacy, general literacy and level of education
Identify key information
Organise your contract according to a balance of readers wants and needs
Know that you don’t have to start with definitions and parties Then we’ll go through how to write legal content clearly.
You’ll learn how to:
Know the difference between legalese and legalisms
Decide whether to replace, explain or define legalisms
Understand the difference between plain language and tone of voice
Use good information design
You’ll emerge from this three-hour workshop ready to collaborate with Legal and Compliance teams to produce the legal content that your audience deserves! After the workshop, I'll offer individual coaching sessions, where I can give feedback and suggestions for any legal content you're working on now.
Your course instructor...
Frances started her career far from the corporate arena – she researched and wrote educational materials for people in rural parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. In 1998, she first moved to London to work for an information design consultancy. This was the beginning of a career that would crisscross continents for decades. Frances’ mission has remain constant: to bridge divides – in education, in financial and legal services, and in digital access. Aside from co-founding consultancy and training firm, Simplified, she also held tenures at a financial inclusion fintech and at Barclaycard.
Frances co-created the Simplified course with plain-language attorney, Candice Burt. The past 15 years has seen Simplified’s course used to train over 9000 professionals how to write in plain language – in the UK, Portugal, South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, Nigeria and the US. The course has an adaptable model for training diverse delegates, from different sectors and different linguistic and cultural contexts.