Saving time and money in the Family Court
When the Family Court of Australia rewrote the divorce application form in plain English it saved time and money and made a difficult process easier for its clients, with:
- 15% fewer self-lodged applications being rejected—down from 48% to 33%
- 11% fewer applications from legal representatives being rejected—down from 25% to 14%
- 70% of users finding the new form easier to use than the average form—a 50% increase in user satisfaction over the previous form
- an average 33% drop in phone enquiries about the form.
Source: Gordon Mills & Mark Duckworth (1996) The Gains from Clarity: A research report on the effects of plain-language in documents.
