WriteMark
Plain Language Standard
Clear legal documents give clear legal authority
Naming a power of attorney means someone else can make decisions for you if you can’t | Photo by Romain Dancre on Unsplash
We all hope we’ll always be able to make our own decisions about our finances and property. But what if we can’t?
Anyone can lose the ability to deal with their affairs through accident or illness. If nobody has the legal authority to act for you or sign documents, dealing with your affairs can be difficult and stressful for you and your family.
A durable power of attorney allows you to give someone the legal power to deal with your affairs and make decisions for you. Setting up a power of attorney means that you control who manages your affairs.
Building a library of free-to-use legal resources
The Kimble Center for Legal Drafting, based at Western Michigan University–Cooley Law School in the US, specialises in writing easy-to-understand legal documents. Their mission is to produce clear legal documents that are free for the public to use in Michigan.
The Kimble Center has published a new Power of Attorney document. People can use it to name someone they trust to make decisions about their finances if they’re not able to.
Reaching the high standard of the WriteMark Plus
The new Power of Attorney follows the pattern of the earlier Power of Attorney for My Health Care. And it has been assessed as meeting the WriteMark criteria for purpose, structure, content, language, and design.
Eventually the Power of Attorney for My Finances also achieved the WriteMark Plus Plain Language Standard. The WriteMark Plus combines an elements-based assessment with user-testing. The results of user-testing led to further fine-tuning of the content.
Design elements guide the user through the document | Image by Gusto Design
Using careful design to support the purpose of the document
The Kimble Center engaged the team at Gusto Design to create a design that would support clarity and accessibility.
Annette Ellis, Creative Director at Gusto, explains:
Once again, we worked with the Kimble Center for Legal Drafting to make a complex process clear and easy to understand. The plain language used in the Power of Attorney form is visually supported using design elements that guide the user through the form, making it easy for users to understand and fill out the required information.
Instructions are provided as shaded boxes adjacent to the form fields, providing users with additional information that helps them understand how to fill out the form correctly. This extra guidance is critical to ensure the form accurately captures their wishes.
The form is screen-readable, and it has fillable fields that make it extra easy to use.
Clear design is critical to ensure the form accurately captures the user’s wishes | Image by Gusto Design
Creating legal documents with a difference
With its plain language and simple design, the Power of Attorney for My Finances joins its health-care companion as a legal document unlike most others.
Joseph Kimble, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at WMU–Cooley Law School, explains:
These two powers of attorney — one for medical decisions and the other for financial decisions — are unlike any legal document you are used to seeing. Both have been tested with users, and both of them are about as user-friendly as they can be.
The lesson? Legal documents do not have to be impenetrable to ordinary readers.
‘Clear and easy to read’
Achieving the WriteMark Plus gives the Kimble Center and users of their document library extra assurance that the document is as clear as it can be.
In this case, user-testing participants had lots of praise for the document. Here are a few of their comments:
It’s clear and it’s easy to read.
The layout and design of the document is clear and easy to read. It’s a five out of five. Lovely!
This certainly is concise, clear layman terms to tell them what the intended use is and then how to use it.
How easily explained each section of it is … I think it was really, really well designed and very self-explanatory. And just really nicely laid out and easily understandable.
Joseph Kimble enjoyed working with the teams at Write and Gusto.
This is the second project on which the Kimble Center for Legal Drafting has teamed with Write and Gusto. Both are a joy to work with. They deliver on time, and their editing and design work is superb.
Find out more about WriteMark Plus — the ultimate in communication excellence
The Kimble Center for Legal Drafting paves the way for innovative legal documents. This article on the Center’s website describes its origins and goals.
Anne-Marie Chisnall November 29th, 2022
Posted In: WriteMark Holders, WriteMark Plus
Tags: accessibility, clear language, form, Joseph Kimble, Kimble Center for Legal Drafting, Legal documents, WriteMark Plus
Start as you mean to go on — with clarity
Verity White of Checklist Legal believes plain language builds trust in client relationships | Photo courtesy of Checklist Legal
For a small-to-medium business, working with people who have similar values and goals is really important. Building a lasting and valuable client relationship relies on trust, and from the client’s perspective, that relationship starts at the point of engagement. So Verity White of Checklist Legal decided she wanted really clear documents to start off the client relationship.
She drafted the documents herself but decided to get some external help from Write and WriteMark. That way she could be doubly sure the client would know what they were signing up to and the relationship would start off on the right foot.
Checklist Legal makes legal advice clear
Verity’s company is all about taking the stress and confusion away from legal situations. One of the main ways she achieves that is through her clear, easy-to-understand advice. She creates readable documents that help her clients achieve their business goals.
Contracts are a core part of a business and reflect the way a business builds a client relationship. Verity is passionate about the ways that clear contracts support client connection and engagement, representing an authentic brand voice, so that the contracts feel like something that belongs to the business. That’s why achieving the WriteMark felt so important to Verity and Checklist Legal.
Verity tells her story below.
Using the ‘Rewrite’ principles to achieve clarity and develop trust
I first came across Write when I attended the plain language conference in Wellington, New Zealand in 2016. I absolutely fell in love with Write as a plain language organisation and with their Rewrite for Change programme. I knew I wanted to be involved with them in some way, shape, or form! And it took launching my own boutique law firm to make that opportunity come about.
Verity White of Checklist Legal was inspired by plain language principles to apply them to her own business | Photo courtesy of Checklist Legal
I thought my engagement documents were pretty good. I had met a bunch of the readability criteria that I had set for myself in creating them, as well worked on the information design. And then I got some really helpful feedback from the Write team, and they helped me refine things a little bit further.
Getting an independent peer review
Camilla Anderson, one of my other plain language and visual contracting heroes. always says that if you had two people speaking French and you wanted to simplify French into a different language, you wouldn’t get French people who only speak French to simplify that language.
So when it comes to simplifying legal writing, having someone else take a look at your own legal writing is often a great approach. It gives you a fresh eye, and it is that trained professional view that I really appreciated from having Write go through the documents. Of course, the ultimate decision on the legal bits and pieces of the documents sits with me. But I really appreciated the advice and patience of the Write team, as we worked through the finer points of the wording together.
Walking the talk by achieving the WriteMark and other certification
I wanted to be able to show that I was walking the walk and talking the talk when it comes to plain language, which I think is really important for law firms. A lot of law firms claim to be writing in plain language, but they really don’t go to the effort of getting their documents checked out fully. And I think that’s shown by the fact that Checklist Legal is the first law firm in Australia to have certified its plain language engagement documents with Write.
In very exciting news, Checklist Legal has recently become a certified B Corp! And I’ve published my new book called Create Contracts Clients Love — the title says it all really!
Check out Verity’s book called Create Contracts Clients Love
Find out about Checklist Legal’s B Corp impact
Find out about Checklist Legal’s pro bono programme
Anne-Marie Chisnall June 9th, 2022
Posted In: WriteMark Holders
Tags: accessibility, Australia, Checklist Legal, client engagement, client relationship, consultancy, law firm, legal agreement, Legal documents, legal writing, plain language, the WriteMark, trust
Kimble Center’s healthcare form awarded ClearMark
The Kimble Center's Power of Attorney for healthcare goes to new heights | Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash
Could the Kimble Center for Legal Drafting’s Power of Attorney for healthcare win any more accolades? Turns out the answer is a definite ‘yes’.
The ClearMark Awards judged the healthcare form worthy of the award for best legal document. The ClearMarks are organised by the US Center for Plain Language and recognise the best plain language communications created by organisations in North America. The Center’s Barbra Kingsley and Alex Miranda announced the 2021 winners as part of the Access for All virtual conference in May.
The judges said about the power of attorney that:
[it] is a wonderful example of making legal text accessible.
And they went on to say:
The writers conducted several different kinds of user testing, including with health professionals and typical lay users. They also benefited from input from the Center’s international board members and PL (plain language) experts in New Zealand. The effort shines through. It’s an exemplary piece, worthy of being winner in its category.
View the list of ClearMark winners
Read about the ClearMark award in an article by Oakland County Legal News
Taking legal documents to new heights
The Kimble Center for Legal Drafting paves the way for innovative, accessible legal documents. This article on the Center’s website describes its origins and goals.
People can use the Power of Attorney document to set up a person they trust to make decisions about their healthcare if they’re not able to. The Power of Attorney is easy to understand and fill out — and it’s free to use for US citizens.
More than 1000 people have used the form since it was published.
Find out more about WriteMark Plus — the ultimate in communication excellence
Design elements guide the user through the document. Image by Gusto Design.
Anne-Marie Chisnall May 21st, 2021
Posted In: The WriteMark, WriteMark Holders, WriteMark Plus
Tags: accessibility, ClearMark, Joseph Kimble, Kimble Center for Legal Drafting, Legal documents, plain language, WriteMark, WriteMark Plus
Kimble Center’s Power of Attorney goes to the top of its class
Organising a power of attorney document for your healthcare means others can take care of you when you can’t. Image by Bimatshu Pyakuryal / Unsplash licence
We all hope we’ll always be able to make our own decisions about our healthcare. But what if we can’t?
The Kimble Center for Legal Drafting, based at Western Michigan University–Cooley Law School in the US, has published a new Power of Attorney document. People can use the Power of Attorney to set up someone they trust to make decisions about their healthcare if they’re not able to. What’s more, the Power of Attorney is easy to understand — and it’s free to use for US citizens.
Design elements guide the user through the document. Image by Gusto Design.
The Kimble Center’s legal team decided they wanted their new document to be top of its class. So they first asked the members of their advisory board for feedback. Then they applied for another layer of review through the WriteMark assessment process.
The WriteMark assessment considers purpose, structure, content, language, and design as part of a rigorous document analysis.
Design to support the purpose of the document
The Center engaged the team at Gusto Design to create a design that would support clarity and readability.
Annette Ellis, Creative Director at Gusto, explains:
We worked with the Kimble Center for Legal Drafting to make a complex process clear and easy to understand. The plain language used for the Power of Attorney form is visually supported using design elements that guide the user through the form, making it easy for them to understand and fill out.
Instructions are provided as shaded boxes adjacent to the form fields, providing users with additional information that helps them understand how to fill out the form correctly. This extra guidance is critical to ensure the form accurately captures their wishes.
Clear design is critical to ensure the form accurately captures the user’s wishes. Image by Gusto Design
All boxes ticked
With its plain language and simple design, the Power of Attorney for My Health Care goes to the top of its class. It meets all the elements of the WriteMark Plain Language Standard — and it’s the first document of its type to achieve the Standard.
Joseph Kimble, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at WMU–Cooley Law School, acknowledges the input from the WriteMark team:
I’m grateful for the invaluable suggestions we received from Anne-Marie Chisnall (a member of our international board of advisers) and then from the WriteMark assessment team. Those suggestions significantly improved almost every page.
And tested with users too
Since we originally published this story, researchers at Michigan State University have user-tested the Power of Attorney document. The Kimble Center applied recommendations from the user-testing report and did a little rewording and redesigning of the document. With these changes, the Power of Attorney achieved WriteMark Plus.
WriteMark Plus is awarded to documents that have reached the WriteMark Standard and that also undergo user-testing for further fine-tuning.
Find out more about WriteMark Plus — the ultimate in communication excellence
Legal documents unlike anything that the public has seen before
The Kimble Center for Legal Drafting paves the way for innovative legal documents. This article on the Center’s website describes its origins and goals.
Anne-Marie Chisnall July 31st, 2020
Posted In: The WriteMark, WriteMark Holders, WriteMark Plus
Tags: accessibility, Joseph Kimble, Kimble Center for Legal Drafting, Legal documents, plain language, the WriteMark, WriteMark Plus