A while back the LIT Lab created a tool to help evaluate the complexity of court forms. The tool, available at RateMyPDF.org, lets you upload a blank court form and receive a simple report on areas of complexity. It’s meant to help identify easy improvements to court forms, like overly complex language, passive voice, etc. You can read more it in our paper, “Beyond Readability with RateMyPDF.”

But why the blog post now? Well, it turns out that RateMyPDF played a part in a recent First Circuit Judicial Council working group on best practices for court forms:

The Forms Simplification and Translation Working Group was tasked with … mak[ing] court processes and procedures more navigable and inclusive for self-represented litigants. After reviewing research on the importance of providing “comprehensive, readily accessible information” to litigants and bankruptcy participants …, the working group engaged staff in a pilot program with the Suffolk University School of Law Legal Innovation and Technology Lab to apply its tools to measure key metrics, such as readability, length, sentence structure, and density in a select number of forms, in order to calculate a “complexity” score and, thereafter, apply recommendations for simplifying the forms.

Emphasis added.

Download the full report or read it here:

Featured Image: Moakley US Courthouse from Boston Harbor by Beyond My Ken.