The article suggests that state standards for general and vocational education should provide mandatory training in communication skills in Russian in various special fields. First of all, it is necessary to develop skills in how to use Russian as the state language for the Russian Federation. The acquired skills are expected to ensure reliable social communication between the authorities and citizens. The article presents basic requirements for Russian when used in legal acts: certainty, clarity, and intelligibility to a wide audience. The article provides results of a comprehensive study, carried out by St. Petersburg University, of legal acts issued in 2014– 2015 in eleven regions of the Northwestern Federal District of the Russian Federation. Types of speech errors found in the texts of these normative acts are singled out, and the significance of the errors is assessed from regarding the risk of social communication disorders. For this purpose we prepared a list of stylistic errors in business language. Among these: semantic violations of compatibility, wrong case forms, formal errors and semantic matching parts of a sentence, the prepositional selection error control, errors of usage, violation of stylistic unity, and genre of the text. The evaluation of the significance of certain errors regarding risk to social communication disorders is provided. It is argued that the purpose of language policy in the field of education should improve the quality of oral and written language in various fields of professional activity.