Plain talk

IR practitioners always invoke transparency. But how transparent can you be when your attorneys and accountants fill your annual reports and earnings releases with euphemistic gobbledegook? SEC chairman Arthur Levitt is on the side of good IR, and perhaps nowhere more so than with the 'plain English' rules the SEC promulgated in October 1998. His campaign seems to be succeeding, although no change has prompted such resistance from the legal profession since English courts dropped Norman French