Olivia Bullock
speaker
283 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 25 Mar
Olivia Bullock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Right.
It's sort of tough, right?
On the one hand, if the goal is impartiality and fairness, then using legal jargon really undermines that goal because people do have this bias of thinking that this is not been a good experience for me and I'm going to blame it on somebody who's in front of me.
So unfortunately, yeah, jargon could be used strategically in those cases to produce a desirable effect, but that's one that might not ultimately be a fair effect.
Yeah.
And we see the negative effects of jargon are really pervasive.
So as I mentioned, I often study them in health and science contexts where you can see that, for example, in patient provider communication, the use of jargon can lead patients to walk away from their medical encounters feeling bad about it, feeling confused, upset.
feeling like they didn't have somebody on their team.
In science contexts, using jargon to talk about science topics like self-driving cars or surgical robots makes people feel like those new science technologies are riskier just by the way that the information about them is presented.
I did a recent study about jargon in the workplace because we're all guilty of using things like synergy and bandwidth.
Absolutely.
But what I found in that study is that the use of jargon in the workplace made people feel like they couldn't do their jobs well and that they were less likely to ask follow-up questions.
So you have a situation where people are confused, they need help the most, but they're the least likely to actually ask the questions because of the negative effects of jargon.
In the U.S., there's been a movement called the plain language movement that is really focused on jury instructions.
But what I'm arguing here is that the need to make things more straightforward doesn't just conclude when jury instructions are given and then the case moves on and then nothing else from there has to be plain language after that.
What I'm arguing is that if, again, the goal is for impartiality and fairness, then doing things like defining
complicated terms, giving members of the jury a glossary of terms that they might hear during an expert witness cross-examination, providing plain language summaries of the expert witness's testimonies or of the testimonies that people hear, and really providing more of an opportunity for jurors to ask questions as well is another way to kind of mitigate those negative effects.
I think this is a solvable problem.
We just need to go a little bit further than we currently are.
Of course.
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