The Art Of Client Communication: Avoid Legal Jargon; Give Sufficient Detail, But Don't Drown Them In It

Just like other forms of legal writing, written client communication is an evolving process that we as litigators must learn to master.

Stefan Savic

Stefan Savic

Just like other forms of legal writing, written client communication is an evolving process that we as litigators must learn to master. It is difficult to strike the right balance between how much detail to include and how in-depth the analysis of a concept should be in client communication. It is even more difficult if your audience consists of people with different levels of legal sophistication.

As my colleagues and I know, effective client communication is key for every litigator. As I wrote before, it may be “just a job” for us litigators, but for most litigants their cases can significantly affect their lives or businesses. They should understand what is going on in their cases, and it is our duty to explain it to them. Notwithstanding it being a crucial part of what we are doing, the fact that the largest percentage of complaints about lawyers relates to the lack of client evidences that lawyers often neglect to adequately communicate with clients.

Effective communication not only involves merely keeping clients apprised of what is happening in their case, but also doing so in a way that they can understand it. In order to do so, lawyers must know how to walk the fine line between providing sufficient information and giving too much information that may result in more confusion.

Explain Why Your Analysis Is Important

Legal analysis without an explanation of practical implications of such analysis is seldom, if ever, helpful outside of perhaps an academic context. If someone asks you to review their non-compete agreement and you explain the temporal and geographical limitation requirements, that information will be of little value without saying why it matters. For instance, it matters because if your employer decides to enforce the non-compete clause, you can argue its unenforceability on those grounds.

John Balestriere recently wrote about the importance of knowing your client’s goal at all times. With any legal analysis that you provide to a client, you should always explain how that analysis affects the client’s intermediate or ultimate goals, which is more important for them to understand than the actual legal nuances that go into it.

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Provide Enough Information, But Not Too Much

It is equally important to give the client sufficient analysis as it is to explain it in a way that does not cause additional confusion through excessively elaborate analysis. Explaining to clients how naming an additional party in a suit may affect their ability to remain in a federal court may require a brief lecture on relevant provisions of 28 U.S.C. 1332, but may not require that you explain the difference between the Second Circuit’s and Third Circuit’s treatment of citizenship of defunct corporations. This is not always as simple as it sounds since determining how in-depth you may have to go in your analysis will depend on a large number of variables.

Make Sure that You Have the Same Understanding of the Terminology

Working with international clients often requires constant communication with those clients’ foreign counsel, whether it be in-house counsel or litigators representing them in another country. This can present a challenge since those foreign attorneys may have a great grasp of legal doctrines and processes in the jurisdictions where they practice, but may be completely unfamiliar with even the basic concepts of U.S. litigation.

Basic legal concepts like diversity jurisdiction or discovery that are (or at least should be) as familiar to the U.S. litigators as their coffee orders may be a big unknown for foreign lawyers. It is important to take a step back and make sure that even though you are dealing with an experienced foreign lawyer, they understand what may be to us basic terminology.

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Include an Abbreviated Version of Analysis First Before Providing an In-depth One

The common challenge with dealing with an audience consisting of individuals with different levels of understanding of legal principles is to avoid appearing patronizing towards those who may already understand them. The part of your audience that is familiar with the concepts for which you provide detailed explanations may consider it wasteful and, in light of lawyers’ general egoistic reputation, offensive. Perhaps more importantly, long emails with familiar rhetoric may discourage busy readers from reviewing all the substance, and, thus, result in a failure to convey the important information.

One of the ways to address this challenge is by providing a succinct version of the analysis at the get-go, and then elaborate in sufficient detail so that the members of your audience that require it will fully understand your explanation.

Always Offer to Explain Things Further or Clarify

This doesn’t require more explanation than the heading itself. Encouraging your audience to tell you what they need to understand better will save time down the line, especially if they later reveal they misunderstood portions of your analysis. Ideally, clients will ask you to explain further what they are unsure about, but that is not always the case and it is a good practice to encourage them to do so.

Avoid Legal Jargon and Legalese in All Client Communication

While I previously wrote about how lawyers often have a difficult time moving away from using legalese in certain types of legal documents, lawyers should categorically avoid complex legal jargon and legalese in communicating with clients. While a court clerk may want you to start each of your paragraphs with “whereas,” your client never will. Using words with same meaning that lawyers continue to use in contract provisions or wills because they don’t want to change the centuries-old, proven recipe will only confuse clients who will likely assume that multiple terms are there because they have different meaning (to avoid appearance of hypocrisy, I view the terms legal jargon and legalese as terms with similar but different meaning).

I have heard a lawyer call himself bilingual once because he knew how to speak English and “legal” (as you may expect from someone who would make that sort of comment, I am not sure that he could really speak either that well). There is unfortunately some truth to this as it is significantly different talking about legal concepts to lawyers than to non-lawyers. Just as a Game of Thrones fan cannot really explain what an episode in season 6 is about to someone who does not watch it, explaining the intricacies of the rule against perpetuities to a non-lawyer (or in that example even to a lawyer) can be very challenging. Just like legal writing, client communication is something that we improve upon with experience and over time.


Stefan Savic was an attorney at Balestriere Fariello, a trial and investigations law firm which represents clients in all aspects of complex commercial litigation and arbitration from pre-filing investigations to trial and appeals. You can reach firm partner John Balestriere at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.