The validity of this assumption is, I think, borne out by evidence from several different - and difficult - areas of law. One is corporation's law. In Australia, much of our corporations law is now drafted in plain language - with (so far as I know) no litigation over meaning. This gives the lie, I think, to those who would say "complex law requires complex drafting". Another example is taxation law. In a study back in 1991, the Victorian Law Reform Commission tested the comprehensibility of part of the then-current Australian income tax legislation. The result? To understand the legislation required 12 years of schooling plus 15 years of university - 27 years' education in all.⁹ But this is now changing. Australia now has tax statutes drafted in language that is brutally plain; New Zealand is following suit; and the UK government has established a tax rewrite program to introduce plain language taxation laws.

The validity of this assumption - that it is possible effectively to express legal concepts in plain language - is also borne out by experience with private legal documents. There is no evidence that plain language legal documents are more prone to litigation than conventionally-drafted ones. Indeed, the reverse seems to be the case. To illustrate: for more than 20 years, Australia's largest car insurance company has been using insurance policies that are exceedingly plain. Some time ago the company's managing director went into print to say that their policies had been entirely free of litigation.¹⁰ Now, a cynic might put this down more to good luck than good management - for eventually some plain language documents will end up in court; drafters are only human. But at least the evidence to date gives the lie to any argument that plain language documents are inherently prone to litigation.