This presentation reports on a comparative genre analysis of Informed Consent Forms (ICFs) in English, Spanish, and Hungarian, with a focus on their degree of patient-friendliness. The study examines four dimensions of the genre: agency, discourse community, stylistic features, and textual structure and content. Methodologically, it combines a genre analysis instrument (Horváth, 2021) with corpus-based techniques using Sketch Engine, allowing for both qualitative and quantitative insights. Preliminary findings indicate that Spanish ICFs are authored predominantly by institutional voices—hospitals, professional associations, and specialized departments—where legal and biomedical registers dominate, often at the expense of accessibility. English texts, by contrast, display a stronger orientation toward patient-centered communication through direct address and simplified phrasing, while Hungarian ICFs reveal a formal tone emphasizing institutional authority. Across the three languages, informed consent functions as a hybrid genre that mediates between expert-to-expert and expert-to-lay communication, but with varying balances between precision and comprehensibility. These results shed light on genre-specific practices across cultural contexts and highlight implications for medical translation, where institutional authority and patient-friendliness must be reconciled.