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Your contracts are confusing your customersNew
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Contracts are confusing cover image
Blog Loyalty 5 min read

Your contracts are confusing your customers

Lewis Dowling Managing Director and Consultant

We’ve all stared at a legal contract, praying that the information will just osmose into your brain through your eyes. Sadly, that never happens.

Contents

Editor's note: Last updated, October 2026.

Instead, we wade through it sentence by sentence. Eventually we give up and skim the rest, hoping that'll do.

Now think about your own contracts. Your terms and conditions, your service agreement, the proposal a new customer signs. That's usually the first thing someone reads after they've said yes to you. If it's hard going, they'll do exactly what you do. Skim it and sign it.

Nobody looks at it again until something goes wrong. A deadline slips. An invoice turns up that they weren't expecting. Everyone digs out the contract, and everyone reads it differently.

Dispute lawyers say ambiguity is the most common cause of commercial disputes. For a small business, one of those arguments can sour a relationship you spent months winning.

The good news is that it's rarely the law making your contract confusing. It's the writing. And you can fix that.

One of two things could be happening when you don’t understand a contract. Either the subject is too technical for you, or the writing is bad.

So in July 2022, researchers looked for the answer. Their conclusion? It’s just poor writing. It’s not your knowledge or skill level. There are certain traits in legal writing that just make it incredibly difficult for anybody to understand.

Interestingly, you’ll notice these traits come up a lot in other dense texts, like complicated instruction manuals or technical white papers. But I digress.

What are the traits of bad writing?

First, the researchers analysed a huge amount of legal texts and looked at how often certain traits came up.

After they’d found the most common traits, they put together a few short snippets of text – one with the traits and one simple – and compared the results.

They looked at five main traits that were making the writing hard to read.

  1. Capital letters. Trying to emphasise a point by writing a word or a sentence in all caps.
  2. Archaic language. Using words that people just don’t use anymore. Words like “aforesaid” and “to wit.”
  3. Legal jargon. Using legal or Latin phrases when there’s an everyday alternative.
  4. Centre-embedding. This is where you jam a piece of information halfway through a sentence, rather than having a separate sentence.
  5. Passive voice. This is where you put the subject of a sentence at the end, rather than at the beginning. So “this contract was written by our legal team” rather than “our legal team wrote this contract.”

Their experiment confirmed that all five of these made it more difficult to understand the contract.

The worst traits were centre-embedding and word choice

While all these traits make it harder to understand a piece of writing, the biggest culprit is centre-embedded clauses. Why? Because they work against our working memory.

If you come across a new piece of information in the middle of a sentence, you have to hold onto both bits at the same time. You don’t have time to process them.

Take this sentence:

We’re going to have a – at midday on Tuesday – meeting about our sustainability plan – including our newest initiative around recycling – and what you can do to help.

It’s hard to read. By the time you get to the end, you’ve forgotten the beginning. Each of those tangents should have been its own sentence.

Here's our rewrite: 

We’re going to have a meeting about our sustainability plan and what you can do to help. We’ll also cover our newest initiative around recycling. The meeting is at midday on Tuesday.

See how much easier it is to digest when we break the information into three separate points?

This is what happens in legal contracts, technical documentation, and corporate reports all the time.

Avoid these bad habits in your own writing

If you want to make your writing simpler and easier to follow, you should follow these four rules:

  1. Stick to one idea a sentence. Split up long sentences and don’t cram multiple ideas into the middle of one.
  2. Emphasise properly. Don’t capitalise sentences just because they’re important. It has the opposite effect.
  3. Use everyday language. Avoid jargon and other obscure terms. It just gets in the way of people understanding you.
  4. Use the active voice. Put the subject first, not last. It makes it much easier to follow.

If you do that, you’ll avoid making your writing sound like a contract. And make sure that everybody can understand you.

Can AI write your contracts for you?

It can help a lot. Just don't hand it the pen and walk off.

AI is good at everything we've covered above. Paste in a clause full of "aforesaid" and "notwithstanding" and ask for plain English. You'll have it back in seconds. Researchers have even built a dataset of over 6,000 legal passages paired with simpler versions, purely to train AI to do this better.

The catch is that a contract can read beautifully and still leave gaps. A 2026 study looked at nearly 9,000 contract clauses written by AI. Plenty of them looked like a professional had drafted them, yet they were still vague or incomplete. That's exactly the kind of clause nobody questions until the day it matters.

So if you're using AI on your contracts, here's how to get the good bits without the risk:

  1. Start with what you've already got. Give it your existing terms and ask for a plain English rewrite. That's safer than asking it to make terms up from scratch.
  2. Check it still says what you meant. Read the new version next to the old one. Simpler wording can change the meaning of a clause without anyone noticing.
  3. Ask it to play the awkward customer. Get it to read your contract as a customer would and list anything that could be read two ways. It's a cheap way to find the gaps before your customers do.
  4. Get a lawyer to sign it off. AI isn't a lawyer. For anything with real money or risk attached, a professional should still check the final version.

Are your customers arguing about what they signed?

If customers keep querying invoices or telling you "that's not what we agreed", read your contract before you blame them.

We help businesses keep their customers happy and coming back. Sometimes that starts with how clearly you explain what they're buying. Get in touch, and we'll help you spot the real culprit.

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