“I understand the legal position. But what does this mean for us?”
It is a question that can catch even a good lawyer off guard. The advice may have taken days to prepare. The relevant provisions have been examined, judgments considered, the regulatory position tested and the uncertainties carefully set out.
Still the client is trying to work out what to do exactly.
The reason is that the lawyer has answered a question about the law, while the client is asking about a business decision.
Consider a client deciding whether to proceed with a project while the regulatory position is evolving. Its lawyers may explain what the statute permits, what the regulations provide, how the regulator has approached similar questions, and where a future challenge could arise. The analysis may be entirely sound.
The client may still want to know whether it should proceed, whether the risk can be managed, what waiting might cost, and what could change the assessment.
The legal analysis has to move from the legal position to its meaning in the circumstances at hand.
The limits of simplification
Lawyers have long been encouraged to use plain English, avoid unnecessary jargon and make complex advice easier to understand. There is good reason for this. Clients need to understand legal advice well enough to make informed decisions.
But simplicity is not always clarity, particularly in sophisticated legal work.
Law depends on distinctions. A transaction may be legally permissible while carrying regulatory exposure that makes it unattractive. A contractual right may exist while exercising it at a particular time carries commercial consequences. A regulatory provision may have a settled interpretation in one context while its application to a new situation remains uncertain.
Remove those qualifications and the advice may become easier to read while becoming less useful.
The lawyer therefore has to decide which aspects of the complexity the client needs to understand, and which can be absorbed through the lawyer’s own analysis.
That is the difference between simplification and translation. Translation places the legal analysis within the client’s circumstances, connecting the rule to the risk and the risk to the choice. The reasoning remains intact, while its practical meaning becomes clearer.
The expert’s problem
Expertise creates its own communication problem. Once knowledge becomes familiar, it is easy to forget how much of one’s understanding depends on concepts and context that others may not share.
A lawyer sees the legal system behind a problem. A client often sees the decision in front of them.
The lawyer may be considering statutory provisions, precedent, competing interpretations and exceptions. The client may be deciding whether to invest, sign, litigate, settle, restructure a business or approach a regulator. They need the legal analysis because of what it means for that choice.
For an in-house lawyer, the direction can also run the other way. The starting point may be a business objective: whether a product can launch, a transaction can proceed or a commercial arrangement can be structured. The General Counsel has to understand the objective, identify the legal constraints and help management decide how those constraints should shape the plan.
This is why a technically excellent legal opinion can still leave an experienced client unsure about the next step. The lawyer may have established the legal position without showing which parts of it should influence the decision.
That requires judgment. Which uncertainty could change the outcome? Which distinction has practical consequences? Which risk deserves attention, and which can remain in the background?
Some complexity belongs with the client. Some belongs with the lawyer because assessing it and identifying its consequences is part of the service being provided.
When explanation becomes legal judgment
Communication is therefore closely tied to substantive legal work.
Imagine a Board considering whether to proceed with a transaction where the regulatory interpretation is unsettled. A detailed legal opinion or memo may set out the statutory framework, authorities, competing interpretations, and possible avenues of challenge. The Board still has to decide whether to proceed, restructure the transaction, seek greater regulatory certainty, or wait.
The lawyer’s judgment becomes visible in how that analysis is brought to those choices.
The same applies in contentious work. A litigator may need to help a client assess the strength of its case alongside costs, evidentiary uncertainty, settlement prospects, and the risk of an adverse outcome. The question is rarely only whether an argument exists; it is whether pursuing it makes sense in the circumstances.
“The law does not prohibit this structure” may be legally accurate. In a particular transaction, more useful advice may be that the structure is available, while an unresolved regulatory interpretation creates an exposure that could affect the project’s economics.
The second formulation has not simplified the law. It has shown where the legal uncertainty sits in relation to the decision.
Framing advice this way is not merely a communication skill. It reflects the lawyer’s assessment of what deserves attention.
Expertise is partly the ability to carry complexity without making the client carry all of it.
A changing test for expertise
This capability is becoming more important as legal questions increasingly intersect with commercial, technological and regulatory decisions. Clients encounter these issues together, even when the professions dealing with them remain separate.
Technology is also making legal information easier to access and process. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can locate authorities, summarise judgments, review contracts, and turn dense material into readable text.
That does not reduce the value of knowing the law. It raises the value of knowing what to do with that knowledge.
The lawyer must identify which parts of the analysis carry weight in the circumstances, where uncertainty lies, what could alter the assessment, and how the available choices should be understood. For external counsel, that may mean connecting legal exposure to a commercial or litigation decision. For a General Counsel, it may mean moving between the business objective and the legal constraints. For a litigator, it may mean connecting legal merits to litigation strategy.
In each case, the work extends beyond stating the legal position. It involves understanding what that position means and helping the person who must act on it exercise better judgment.
Clients do not necessarily need less complexity from their lawyers. They need someone capable of understanding it deeply enough to show which parts deserve their attention and how they bear on the choice before them.
That is what the question “What does this mean for us?” is really asking. It is not a request to strip the law of its complexity. It is a request to make that complexity useful.
Legal expertise is at its most valuable when complexity can be understood without losing the meaning that makes it important.
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