• Another firm, Mallesons Stephen Jaques (Australia's largest law firm and winner of "Best Australian Law Firm" in 2001) recently prepared consulting and support services agreements for Microsoft in plain language. Those documents are now being used as a model for Microsoft's services agreements in many countries.

Mallesons Stephen Jaques and Phillips Fox have been working hard on the plain-language front since the early 1990s. In those days they were breaking new ground. Now, many other Australian law firms are active in relation to plain language—all of them would at least claim to write in plain language.

This development in Australian law firms seems likely to be a sign of things to come. After all, today, commercial clients of Australian law firms are prepared to pay for legal services that are plain. One day, clients everywhere will refuse to pay for legal services unless they are plain.

It's worth dwelling on these developments for a moment.

5.4 Plain-language wins the debate and kicks on in law firms and in legislation

As far as I know, this development in Australian law firms is not common in other countries. Also, in the countries other than Australia where law firms are developing plain-language expertise, they seem to be doing so in response to regulatory demand—rather than seeing plain language as an opportunity to provide a new service for clients. For example, major commercial law firms in the US are equipping themselves to write documents that meet the plain-language requirements of the SEC regulations.

The history is very different in Australia where law firms adopted and committed to plain language in response to client demand.

In Australia, clients started demanding plain-language documents as soon as the legal profession fell silent in its debate with the plain-language movement (as it was!) about the incompatibility of clarity on the one hand with accuracy, certainty, and precision on the other hand. That debate was lead, on the plain-language side, by the Law Reform Commission of Victoria under the direction of its Chairman David St L Kelly.

The Commission published a discussion paper and 2 reports on plain language.¹²