When explaining to our Buffalo personal injury clients how their case will be handled, we find that much of our time is spent explaining the terms that the legal system uses to define various things and events.
So why do lawyers use so many difficult terms? Well, as is typical of the law, there is no one easy answer. Part of the problem is that the legal system we use in personal injury cases has been developed over several hundred years, and during that time, some of the terms that people may use in everyday conversation, such as “serious injury” or “negligence,” have been refined over the years to take on a very specific meaning within the context of the legal system.
As a result, a word that has one meaning in everyday language may have a slightly different meaning when used in a legal sense, which can be confusing for clients.
A second problem related to the length of time over which are legal system has developed is that some archaic words, or even foreign terms, have continued to be used by lawyers long after they have fallen out of normal use in the English language. In other words, lawyers sometimes use words that nobody else understands anymore. For example, “tortfeasor” is a term used to refer to the responsible party in a civil case. It is derived from an Old French term that translates as “wrongdoer.”
Recently, there seems to have been an informal shift away from the use of archaic and foreign words in the legal community. Hopefully, this trend will continue and it will become easier for clients to understand what is happening in their cases in the future.
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