Let's simplify legal jargon - Alan Siegel

[Music] [Music] [Applause]

So basically, we have public leaders, public officials who are out of control. They're writing bills that are unintelligible, and out of these bills are going to come maybe 40,000 pages of regulations total complex, which has a dramatically negative impact on our life. Um, if you're a veteran coming back from Iraq or Vietnam, uh, you face a blizzard of paperwork to get your benefits. If you're trying to get a small business loan, you face a blizzard of paperwork.

What are we going to do about it? I define simplicity as a means to achieving clarity, transparency, and empathy. You building humanity into communications. I've been simplifying things for 30 years. I come up out of the advertising and design business. My focus is understanding you people and how you interact with the government to get your benefits, how you interact with corporations, decide who you're going to do business with, uh, and how you view brands.

So very quickly, when President Obama said, um, I I don't see why we can't have a one-page plain English consumer credit agreement, so I locked myself in a room, figured out the content, organized the document, and wrote it in plain English. I've had this checked by the two top consumer credit lawyers in the country. This is a real thing now.

Uh, I went one step further and said, why do we have to stick with the stylized lawyers and just have a paper document? Let's go online. So many people might need help in computation working with a Harvard Business School, uh, you'll see this example when you talk about minimum payments. If you spend $2 for a meal, the longer you take to pay out that loan, you see over a period of time using the minimum payment, it's $997.

How about that? You think your bank's going to show that to people? But it's going to work. It's more effective than just computational aids. And what about, uh, terms like, um, over the limit? Um, perhaps a stealth thing defined in context. Tell people what it means. When you put it in plain English, you almost force the institution to give the people a way out of that and not put themselves at risk.

Plain English is about changing the content. One of the things I'm most proud of is this agreement for IBM. It's a grid, it's a calendar. At such and such a date, IBM has responsibilities; you have responsibilities. Received very favorably by business, and there's some good news to report today.

Each year, one in 10 taxpayers receive a notice from the IRS. There are 200 million letters that go out. Running through this typical letter that they had, I ran it through my Simplicity lab. It's pretty unintelligible. All the um parts of the document in red are not intelligible. We looked at doing over a thousand letters that cover 70% of the transactions; they're in plain English.

They've been tested in the laboratory. When I run it through my lab, uh, this heat mapping shows everything is intelligible, and the IRS has introduced the program looking at now. There are a couple of things going on right now that I want to bring to your attention. There's a lot of discussion now about uh, Consumer Financial Protection Agency, how to mandate simplicity.

We see all this complexity, uh, it's incumbent upon us and this organization, I believe, to make clarity, transparency, and empathy a national priority. There's no way that we should allow government to communicate the way they communicate. There's no way we should do business with companies that have agreements with stealth provisions and that are unintelligible.

So how are we going to change the world? Make clarity, transparency, and simplicity a national priority. I thank you. [Music]

What does a machine know about itself? Can it know when it needs to be repaired and when it doesn't? In industries like manufacturing and energy, they're using predictive analytics to detect signs of trouble, helping some companies save millions on maintenance because machines seek help before they're broken and don't when they're not.

That's what I'm working on. I'm at IBM. Let's build a smarter planet.