Clear language is key to open justice

This article is written by María G. Silva Rojas, Chief Judge of the Sala Regional Ciudad de México of the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (the Mexico City section of the Electoral Federal Courthouse).

• The problem: Some authorities communicate in a very complicated way that prevents society from understanding their work.
• Why it matters: Communicating in clear language is key to accountability and open government. It enables people to know what we do, how we do it and why we do it.
• The solution: Be willing to communicate clearly, convince your team to follow your lead and facilitate proofreading sessions with focus groups to check if your work can be understood.

On the very first day of my job in my courthouse, before I was appointed as judge, I was asked to write a [something-I-didn’t-understand] document regarding an [another-very-weird-word-I-didn’t-know].

By then, I’d been a lawyer (with license) for almost ten years, and even though I had studied law, and actively practised it – although in a different field – I couldn’t understand what was being asked of me in such very technical legal jargon. I realised then that for ‘the rest of the world’ – the people who had not studied law – it would be almost impossible to understand what we were doing.

Writing in clear language helps people to understand what we, the authorities, do.

And that was not ok. I was working in the electoral courthouse of my country, where all the political and electoral trials were decided. We should be communicating in a simple manner, using clear language so that anybody can understand our rulings.

Time for change

Once I was appointed a judge, one of the first things I decided to do was to change this communication problem. I set up a meeting with all of my team and told them my thoughts about the legal jargon we were using and why I was determined to change it. And we all started to work on a list of “forbidden words”.

Image: My office door where everybody can see the “forbidden words”

The legal jargon that at some point even we – lawyers – don’t know exactly what they mean; words so technical that they cannot be found in a regular dictionary but must be searched for in a legal one.

And we started to change things.

A couple of months later we compared the work we’d been doing and the changes were striking. I asked some people (a photographer, a janitor and a chauffeur) to help us read some of the legal decisions we had issued after our ‘clear language meeting’ and to tell us if they understood them. There were some things we found that could be changed, but it was not the words we used. They all understood what we were saying.

The key to open justice

If you are a public servant, it is important to bear in mind that you cannot be accountable if you communicate with society in such a way that even when you write or speak their language, it is impossible for people to understand what you are saying. Writing in clear language helps people to understand what we, the authorities, do, how we solve the problems we face and why we make the decisions we take. It helps authorities to gain trust by being transparent in such a way that anybody can understand and scrutinise the work we do, even make suggestions on how to improve it! This is one of the main targets of an open government, an open justice.

If you lead a team, it is also important you encourage them to communicate well. Avoid giving orders though – bring your team in and convince them of the power of good communication, then the message spreads and will remain even once you are gone.

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)