High-level EU courts apparently assume all those who read their acronym-littered opinions and judgements are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who already know what the acronyms stand for.

I’m not a lawyer but this seems sloppy from a legal standpoint because an acronym that is never expanded is ambiguous. It creates room for confusion and misinterpretation in the worst case, and in the very least wastes the reader’s time on investigation.

Have lawyers and judges not been trained on this? As a technologist, my training included the good practice of expanding every single acronym the first time it appears, as I did above with “SME”, as well as the extra diligent but optional practice of including a section at the end with all expansions.

I realise that the whole legal industry is made up of mostly tech illiterates. Geeks have the advantage of being able to use LaTeX with the acro package¹, which enables us to write acronyms without thinking about where it first appears because the software automatically expands the first occurrances (or as we specify). Legal workers have probably limited themselves to dumbed down tools like MS Word which probably does not automate this, but nonetheless it’s the writer’s duty to see that acronym expansion happens.

Abbreviations:

SME: Subject Matter Expert

¹ In LaTeX, the preamble would have \DeclareAcronym{sme}{short=SME, long=Subject Matter Expert} and throughout the document each instance would be written as \ac{sme}.