This is not to say that writing legal documents in plain language is easy. Legal writing poses problems not usually found in other forms of writing. A leading issue is, what do we do with legal "terms of art", particularly those terms whose meanings have been judicially-defined? Here there are some differences of approach. Some plain language proponents do their best to eliminate terms of art altogether - they find some other way of expressing the legal ideas inherent in the term. The danger with this, of course, is that legal precision can be lost unless the new words accurately capture the legal nuances of the original. This may require real skill, and a great deal of research. And so another way is to retain terms of art, but then to add an explanation of what the legal word or phrase means - a sort of "best of both worlds" approach.

But whichever approach we adopt, we should not exaggerate the problem of terms of art. The problem is not nearly as great as many opponents of plain legal language seem to imagine. Research shows that, in any given area of law, the number of legal terms which have been judicially-defined, is likely to be quite small. For example, studies in the United States of America show that the proportion of judicially-defined terms in standard form contracts for the sale of land may be as low as three percent¹¹. The implication is that you can play with the other 97% without losing the benefit of judicial exegesis. And some of the three per cent required judicial exposition for the very reason they were inherently uncertain - those terms it would be best to avoid altogether.