The Centre is committed to encouraging use of plain legal language by lawyers, public officials, and private organisations. It performs research, prepares precedents, provides consultancy services, and develops planning programs. It has a permanent staff of six. Its Director is Mark Duckworth. Like the Communication Research Institute of Australia, the Centre emphasises layout, as well as expression, as an important means to improve legal communication.
Brochures disdain the usual dense text of legal publications.
By the use of differential headings, marginal indenting, blank spaces between different ideas and the adoption of simple rules, the Centre practises what it preaches. As one of its activities for 1993, the Centre sponsored a visit to Australia by Associate Professor Joseph Kimble of the Thomas Cooley Law School at Lansing, Michigan in the United States. The law books are full of judicial criticisms of legal drafting, including legislation. Conferences resound with judicial invocations to simpler expression. The judgment is so encrusted with the doctrine of precedent that it tends to be forbidding.