Cutting Legal Jargon From Your Defense Firm's Website Copy

Most criminal defense websites are written by lawyers, and it shows. The pages explain arraignment, discovery and suppression motions in the same words a lawyer would use with a colleague across the hall. The language is accurate. It is also the reason a lot of visitors read two lines and leave.

The person reading your charge page is usually frightened and rarely trained in law. They want to know what happens next and whether you can help them. Plain copy gets them there faster, and it does not require you to give up precision. This piece covers how to find the jargon on your site and replace it with sentences a worried reader can follow at midnight on a phone.

Why jargon costs you calls

A visitor who hits a wall of legal terms has two choices. They can work through it, or they can tap the back button and try the next firm in the results. Many pick the second, and you never learn they were there.

Jargon also hides good news. Terms like "diversion," "deferred adjudication" or "pretrial intervention" mean specific things in your state. A reader who does not know them may assume they do not apply to their case. If the most hopeful information on the page is locked inside a phrase the reader cannot decode, the page has failed at its main job.

Find the problem words first

Before you rewrite anything, make a list. Open your five most visited pages and highlight every word a friend outside the law would have to ask you about. The usual suspects look something like this:

• Arraignment, indictment and information
• Probable cause and reasonable suspicion
• Nolo contendere and Alford plea
• Expungement, sealing and set-aside
• Discovery, motion in limine and suppression

You do not need to delete these words. Some of them will come up in court, and your client should recognize them when the judge says them. The aim is narrower: every term gets explained the first time it appears, in a sentence a reader can follow without a dictionary.

Rewrite in the order a client thinks

Lawyers tend to organize pages the way a statute or a case file is organized. Elements first, then penalties, then defenses. Clients think in a different order. Their questions sound more like this: Am I going to jail? Will I lose my license or my job? What do I do before the first court date?

Try restructuring one practice page around those questions. Put the answer to the most frightening one near the top, and state it honestly. If the honest answer is "it depends," say what it depends on. A short paragraph that names the real factors, such as prior record or whether anyone was hurt, helps a reader far more than a block of sentencing ranges copied from the code.

Define terms inside the sentence

The quickest fix for jargon is an inline definition. Instead of sending readers to a glossary, explain the word where it shows up.

Compare two versions of the same line. The first reads: "Your attorney may file a motion to suppress." The second reads: "Your attorney may ask the judge to throw out evidence the police gathered illegally, which is called a motion to suppress." The second line is longer. It is also the one a reader can act on.

Keep these definitions short. One clause usually does it. If a concept needs a full paragraph to make sense, give it its own section with a plain heading that a client might actually type into Google.

Vary the rhythm

Plain writing does not mean every sentence has five words. Copy that runs in identical short bursts reads like a form letter, and readers notice. Use a short sentence to land a point. Use a longer one when you are walking someone through a process where each step depends on the one before it, such as what happens between booking and the first appearance.

Read each page out loud before it goes live. Where you run out of breath, split the sentence. Where it starts to sound like a robot, join two of them back together.

A few habits help across the whole site:

• Write "you" and "we" instead of "the defendant" and "counsel"
• Replace Latin phrases with their English meaning
• Put deadlines and numbers in digits so they stand out on a phone screen
• Cut filler such as "aforementioned," "herein" and "pursuant to"

Plain does not mean promising

Simple wording can drift into promises if nobody is watching. "We get charges dropped" is plain English, and it is also the kind of statement bar regulators tend to treat as misleading. ABA Model Rule 7.1 bars false or misleading communications about a lawyer's services, and most states have adopted some version of it along with their own advertising requirements. Check your state bar's advertising rules before publishing new copy. Then have a lawyer at the firm read every rewritten page for accuracy, since a clearer sentence that gets the law wrong is worse than the jargon it replaced.

Questions about plain-language website copy

Will simpler wording hurt my search rankings?

Usually the opposite happens. People search in everyday words, such as "can I get my record cleared," much more often than in statutory terms. Using the everyday phrase and the legal term on the same page helps you match both kinds of search.

Should I remove legal terms entirely?

No. Your clients will hear those words from the judge and the prosecutor. Keep the term, explain it once, and use plain words around it.

How do I know a page is plain enough?

Hand it to someone outside the law and ask them to tell you, in their own words, what happens next. If they can do that, the page works. If they hesitate, find the paragraph that lost them and start there.

SBD Marketing is a marketing company that works only with criminal defense law firms, and only one firm per city. We build defense firm websites, run SEO for the charges a firm handles, work on visibility in AI search tools and carry out SEO audits. For more on this topic, our guides to persuasive legal copywriting cover headlines and practice page wording, and this piece on designing a defense firm website for one-handed phone use looks at where that copy appears on a small screen.