State Bar of Wisconsin
Legalese (Simplified)

Content strategy / Brand voice

Overview

The State Bar of Wisconsin's public-facing content assumes the reader is a lawyer. This project set the Bar's content standards, establishing tone guidelines, a plain language framework, and a reading target that makes legal information accessible without making it imprecise.

Problem

Much of the Bar's audience comprises public users seeking legal information: they're small-town residents looking for local lawyers, people looking to dispute client cases, and people who can't afford to call anyone. Content relevant to members—benefits, resources, and legal resource help—it all reads like legalese. This has harmed bounce rates and over-inflated user engagement, as lawyers get stuck on pages because of their intricacy.

Scope

This was a content strategy project. I audited existing public-facing pages, established readability benchmarks, developed tone and voice guidelines, produced rewrites across multiple content categories, and issued UI recommendations affecting how content was presented on the page.

Goals

  1. Set a plain language standard for all public-facing content

  2. Audit content for its adherence to WCAG writing standards

  3. Build a tone guide that writers could apply without interpretation

  4. Preserve legal accuracy

Research

A content audit came first. Running Flesch-Kincaid scores across the existing public-facing pages put the average reading level at grade 12. Legal terms were always used before they were defined.

Legal content carries a specific constraint that general web writing doesn't. Simplifying language can introduce ambiguity, and ambiguity in legal information causes real harm. That defined the project's limits early.

Then came defining what plain language means for our writers. Targeting an 8th grade reading comprehension level is easy to state, but hard to define. Nielsen Norman Group's research on how people read online also shaped where definitions belong, how much a paragraph can reasonably ask of a reader before losing them, and UI adjustments to improve reading speed.

Work

From the audit came the brand voice guidelines. The Bar's content is written and maintained by over a dozen people across different departments, each working to their own unspoken standard. Without a shared framework, consistency was impossible. The guidelines defined a target: written to educate someone with no legal background. This meant defining the technical jargon, when needed, in a glossary style.

For larger reworks, I introduced the organization to the Hemingway Editor and how to write plain language prompts with AI tools. This took a load off the team and smoothed the editing approach.

One finding from the audit was the UI problem. Several pages let content run the full width of the browser. Research on reading comprehension puts the optimal line length around 80 characters: long enough to establish a reading rhythm, short enough that the eye can return to the start of the next line without losing its place. That standard went into the guidelines as a layout requirement. Constraining the content column didn't change a word on the page, but in-house tests showed an increase in both reading speed and comprehension.

Reflections

What made this project work was keeping the constraint explicit. Rewrite the explanation, not the law. The audit ended up being the most useful deliverable. Knowing which pages were the actual problem meant the rewriting effort went where it could have impact.

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