The "burdensome stakes" are high in Australia where at least one regulator strongly encourages some organizations to test the clarity of some of their documents—for example, the Corporations Act 2001 requires financial organizations to produce Product Disclosure Statements for each product the organization sells. The law requires those documents to be "… presented in a clear, concise and effective manner."³⁴ That's not so unusual. But in the explanatory material³⁵ for the legislation, the regulator, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (which is the Australian equivalent of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission) suggests that organizations test documents on consumers to ensure that the documents are truly clear and that they really meet the legislative requirements.

This encouragement to test is a potentially onerous but, even so, a legitimate requirement. After all, it's easy to say "our documents are in plain language"—it's rather like when someone says "the cheque's in the mail". But no one can really be sure a document is clear unless a sample audience has confirmed that they can use the document to find, to understand, and to use the information they seek.

7.2 The opportunities and promise

Plain language can also be seen in a positive way, for some organizations plain language is:

• a product—eg, my business Words and Beyond provides plainlanguage document rewriting services, plain-language training courses, and plain-language cultural-change services. There are many other organizations, legal and non-legal, providing similar services— including the Australian law firms I mentioned earlier, Mallesons Stephen Jaques, and Phillips Fox;

• a key part of excellent customer service and client service—eg, for Clarica, for Mallesons Stephen Jaques, and for Phillips Fox;

• a distinguishing feature—eg, for KPMG, for Clarica, for Mallesons Stephen Jaques, and for Phillips Fox.

So for law firms, plain language can be wonderful in 3 ways: as a product, as a value adding part of the experience of buying legal services from the firm, and as a distinguishing feature that clients value.