We kept lawyers on staff to "review" ~ not "write".
Fact is, legislation, regulations, handbooks, and public notices written by lawyers, or even committees of lawyers are litigation bombs waiting to blow up.
You must write the rules that control the margins of your society in the common tongue ~ not jargon.
I think the STATE needs to provide judges with lawyers to advise them ~ not just prosecutors and defense counsel.
Some people have a natural talent to be judges ~ some don't ~ most lawyers don't. With Georgia running out of lawyers your talented bench available for service on the bench is declining as well, and maybe dangerously so.
Again, bring in people who can judge ~ and provide them with legal assistants.
That's what we do with the Supreme Court ~ after all some of those people were NEVER practicing lawyers, and some of them did law so long ago they don't remember what it was about. Still, I bet even Ginsburg could run a bench all day long (with her staff available to deal with the questions). At the same time the guys on her staff probably couldn't hold up in 20 minutes of traffic court.
It did not work. I did insurance litigation for 15 years, and we shuddered when we saw one of those "plain language policies" coming. You think it's 'the common tongue', but nobody knows what it means from a binding, legal point of view.
Same thing with construction contracts. The AIA Standard Form is the way to go because every word has been litigated and has a single meaning. Many words in everyday language have multiple meanings, and most ordinary conversations assume a great deal that isn't said. That leads to problems when binding legal meaning is placed on ordinary conversational English. Those contracts drawn up on notebook paper on the tailgate of a pickup truck are just fine until the parties have a disagreement and nobody can agree exactly what they meant by "rain day".
I thought our residential contractor was going to bust a gut laughing when we handed him a standard AIA form. But later, when he tried to weasel out of the completion date, "rain day" was precisely defined and the allowance for completion was specified.
There was a political appointment here a number of years ago. Nice lady, a law school classmate of mine, but very little actual courtroom experience (she was primarily a politician and her law practice was limited to bond issues, I think). A Great Moment in Legal History when at an arraignment one of the lawyers asked for a Jackson-Denno hearing, and she responded, "How soon can you have Mr. Jackson and Mr. Denno here?"
Multiple face-palms all down the bar.