Most people cannot understand the legal contracts they sign every day—from mortgages to insurance policies—leaving vulnerable groups exposed to financial harm and companies at risk of regulatory fines. CommCheck is a readability tool that goes beyond simple word-counting or AI text simplification. Existing tools are easy to game with short but obscure words, while AI solutions often lose legal precision, cannot handle specialised terms reliably, and raise data privacy concerns. CommCheck instead draws on research about which words people actually know, how hard they are to process, and how reading works in real-world contexts—developed by experts in language and law. If successful, CommCheck could quietly reshape a system most people never think about: the legal documents that underpin everyday financial life. Companies would meet regulatory requirements like the FCA’s Consumer Duty without sacrificing legal accuracy. Consumers—especially those with lower literacy levels—would face less risk from fine print they cannot parse. The result is a more transparent infrastructure for contracts, without requiring anyone to become a legal expert.
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Modern life revolves around contracts and legal agreements. Yet large segments of the population do not understand them, exposing vulnerable groups to undue risk. More specifically, legal documents abound in everyday life – from credit agreements to insurance policies and mortgages. In the UK, regulators have implemented measures to reduce the risk of harm to consumers by mandating that companies use clear and accessible communication (e.g., Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty regulation). Thus, companies must provide clear and accessible legal documents to ensure regulatory compliance, as well as to avoid reputational damage and/or fines. However, literacy levels in the UK mean that many people will not understand legal documents nor their implications. Our company – CommCheck – enables companies to comply with regulations and to provide their own downstream customers with a better user-experience. CommCheck is a readability solution that empowers companies to draft legal texts for their customers in accessible language. Other readability tools are available that involve ‘count measures’ (e.g., counting word and sentence length) have been available for decades (e.g., Microsoft Word offers a basic tool). These are easy to ‘game’ by using short words and sentences (e.g., “doff” elicits better readability than “remove” because it is shorter). Alone, these tools are therefore inappropriate. AI solutions provide text simplification. However, explainability, reproducibility, enforceability, context and maintaining business intent are major failures of current A1 tools. Also, AI solutions cannot use specialized words reliably and plain English does not ensure that legal precision is maintained. AI solutions also present data privacy and confidentiality concerns. CommCheck is a research-backed solution that incorporates data about what words people know, how difficult they are to process, as well as data from reading in real-world contexts. CommCheck has been developed by world-leading experts to ensure that our solution offers accuracy and performance which exceeds competitor products.
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