Plain-Language Statute Companion

An experiment in whether a statute can be restated at a grade-eight reading level without losing anything a court would rely on.

pilot

Scope

Chapter 50B only. Produces a plain-language reading of a statute section beside the statutory text, never in place of it. The statutory text is always shown first and always in full.

Status

Closed pilot with three legal aid offices. 412 sections reviewed by an attorney editor to date. Not available to the public and not scheduled to be.

Limits

It does not apply law to facts. It does not answer questions. It has no access to case law and cannot tell you whether a statute has been construed. Output that has not been reviewed by two editors is never published.

Method

Published in full: the prompt, the review protocol, the sampling procedure, and the error rate found in sampling. A reader who disagrees with our numbers can reproduce them.

Change log

2026-03-11Error rate in sampling fell from 2.1% to 1.4% after the second-editor requirement.

2026-02-19Added a second-editor sign-off requirement before any output is shown to a pilot office.

2026-01-30Scope narrowed from Chapter 50 to 50B after two mis-statements of the ex parte standard.

Cite as

N.C. Law Innovation Lab, Working Paper No. 4 (2026)