Back when I was trying cases regularly, I developed a little courtroom hobby.<\/p>\n
Police officers would take the stand and slip into what I can only describe as cop speak<\/em>. Something happens when someone sits in the witness chair and suddenly every ordinary human verb in the English language becomes\u2026 robotic.<\/p>\n \u201cUpon surveillance, I observed the male entering and exiting the establishment on multiple occasions.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d pause.<\/p>\n \u201cYou mean you watched him going in and out of the store?\u201d<\/p>\n The jurors would chuckle.<\/p>\n Or this one:<\/p>\n \u201cThe suspect alighted from the vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou mean he ran away from the car?\u201d<\/p>\n Another chuckle.<\/p>\n It became a sort of gentle translation service. The officer wasn\u2019t trying to mislead anyone. It\u2019s just that somewhere along the way, a plain sentence like I saw him run away from the car<\/em> becomes transformed into something that sounds like it belongs in a police procedural.<\/p>\n The jurors always appreciated the translation. Not just because it was funny, but because it made the testimony feel\u2026 normal, human again.<\/p>\n At the time I thought I was simply doing the jury a favor.\u00a0 It turns out cognitive science says I may have been doing something much more important.<\/p>\n A recent study tested how legal jargon affects the way jurors process information and make decisions.[1]<\/a> Researchers gave over 1,000 participants a fictional trial transcript describing expert testimony in a financial fraud case.[2]<\/a> The participants were randomly assigned to read one of two versions of the exact same testimony.<\/p>\n One version used standard legal and technical language:<\/p>\n \u201cinsolvency litigation,\u201d The other version replaced those terms with ordinary language:<\/p>\n \u201cbankruptcy trials,\u201d The information in both transcripts was identical. Same facts. Same testimony. Same length. Only the language changed.<\/p>\n After reading the testimony, participants had to do what jurors do: decide whether the defendant was guilty and report how confident they felt in their decision.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where things get uncomfortable: The jargon didn\u2019t just make the testimony harder to read.\u00a0 It changed the way people judged the defendant.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n First, the obvious finding: jargon made the testimony harder to process. Psychologists call this processing fluency<\/em>, the subjective experience of how easy or difficult something is to understand.[4]<\/a> When information flows smoothly, we feel confident and comfortable. When it doesn\u2019t, our brains start sending little warning signals that something is off.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the twist: When the testimony felt harder to process, jurors were more likely to vote guilty.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n Let that sink in for a moment.<\/p>\n Nothing about the facts changed. The evidence didn\u2019t change. Only the language changed.<\/p>\n Yet when the language became more technical and jargon-heavy, jurors became more inclined to convict.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n Because our brains are terrible at diagnosing the source of our own mental discomfort.\u00a0 If something feels difficult to process, we instinctively look for an explanation. But instead of thinking, this testimony is hard to understand<\/em>, we often leap to a different conclusion entirely:<\/p>\n Something about this situation feels suspicious.<\/em><\/p>\n And sometimes that suspicion, \u201cthat metacognitive discomfort can be misattributed not just to the message or the self, but to a third party: the defendant.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n In other words, jurors may subconsciously blame the person on trial<\/em> for the fact that the testimony itself is difficult to follow.<\/p>\n But Wait a Second\u2026 That\u2019s Not What I Did<\/strong><\/p>\n Now here\u2019s the part that made me pause when I read the study.<\/p>\n If jargon makes jurors more likely to convict, then my little translation routine should have been a terrible strategy.<\/p>\n After all, I was the prosecutor. The police officer was my<\/em> witness. If robotic police jargon nudges jurors toward suspicion, maybe I should have just let him keep sounding like RoboCop.<\/p>\n Instead, I did the opposite. I translated him.<\/p>\n \u201cUpon surveillance I observed the male entering and exiting the establishment.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou mean you watched him going in and out of the store?\u201d<\/p>\n Why would simplifying the language help my case if the research suggests that disfluency nudges jurors toward guilt?<\/p>\n The answer, I think, lies in the difference between momentary suspicion and overall persuasion.<\/p>\n Yes, jargon creates cognitive friction. When information feels hard to process, people sometimes misattribute that discomfort to the situation or the defendant. That may be why disfluency nudged some participants toward guilty verdicts in the experiment. But disfluency also produces a host of other downstream effects: jurors feel less confident in their decisions, less capable of serving as jurors, and less trusting of the judicial system.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n None of those things are good for persuasion.<\/p>\n Jurors who feel confused are not happy jurors. Jurors who feel incompetent are not engaged jurors. And jurors who feel alienated from the process are not particularly receptive to the case you\u2019re trying to present.<\/p>\n By translating the officer\u2019s testimony into ordinary language, I was doing two things at once:<\/p>\n And that combination \u2013 clarity plus credibility \u2013 turns out to be a powerful persuasive tool.<\/p>\n Now, to be fair, lawyers use jargon for a reason. Technical terms can be precise, efficient, and meaningful within a professional community. Among lawyers, saying \u201cres ipsa loquitur\u201d or \u201cfiduciary duty\u201d can sometimes be quicker than explaining the concept from scratch.<\/p>\n But jurors aren\u2019t members of that community.<\/p>\n To them, jargon is just friction. And cognitive friction rarely helps persuasion.<\/p>\n A Quick Word About Expert Witnesses<\/strong><\/p>\n If this research makes anyone uncomfortable, it should probably be expert witnesses.<\/p>\n Experts live in jargon. Their professional credibility is built on technical vocabulary that signals training and expertise. And sometimes that vocabulary is genuinely necessary.<\/p>\n But the study suggests that every layer of technical language adds cognitive burden for jurors. When that burden grows too large, jurors stop evaluating the evidence itself and start reacting to how difficult the testimony feels to process.<\/p>\n That reaction can show up in strange ways \u2013 reduced confidence, disengagement, or misplaced suspicion.<\/p>\n Which means the most persuasive expert witness may not be the one who sounds the most technical.<\/p>\n It may be the one who can explain the science as if they were talking to a smart neighbor across the fence.<\/p>\n A Teaching Moment for Advocacy Classrooms<\/strong><\/p>\n For those of us who teach trial advocacy, the lesson seems pretty clear.<\/p>\n Law students often equate professionalism with formality. The more technical the vocabulary, the more \u201clawyerly\u201d they feel.\u00a0 \u201cLook, Ma, I used a \u2018wheretofore!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But jurors aren\u2019t grading them on how well they sound like a legal treatise.<\/p>\n Jurors are trying to understand a story.<\/p>\n The advocates who win that contest are usually the ones who strip away the linguistic clutter and make the facts easy to process.<\/p>\n In other words, the goal isn\u2019t to sound smart. The goal is to make the jury feel smart.<\/p>\n And sometimes the most powerful question in a courtroom isn\u2019t complicated at all.<\/p>\n \u201cYou mean he ran away from the car?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Olivia M. Bullock, Jargon, Fluency, and Judgment: How Legal Jargon Shapes Juror Decision-Making<\/u>, Journal of Applied Communication Research (2026).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Id.<\/em> at 6.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Id<\/em>. at 9.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Id<\/em>. at 2.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Id<\/em>. at 9.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cfraudulent conveyances,\u201d
\n\u201cembezzlement,\u201d
\n\u201cescheatment reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cdebt transfers,\u201d
\n\u201ctheft,\u201d
\n\u201cproperty reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n