After years of teaching legal writing courses, Gary Kinder noticed a pattern in the mistakes people were making. Once he noticed, he knew there had to be a way to make editing for clarity and brevity quicker and easier, freeing writers up to do more detail oriented editing. We asked him about how he came to create WordRake, and he shared the story with us.

What is your role and how did you get to where you are today?

After law school, I did not want to practice just yet. I passed the Florida bar, briefly taught Legal Writing at the University of Florida, then headed West to see snow. I worked as a bellman in the Sun Valley Lodge, tried cases one day a week as the county’s assistant prosecutor, and sold my first article to a national magazine. One cold January night, while working the front door of the Lodge, I met the wife of a famous novelist, who introduced me to her husband, who introduced me to a New York agent, who turned me over to his son, who was just beginning his career representing authors. He sold my first book to a New York publisher, and he is still my literary agent.

If you’re a heartbroken poet living in an unheated garret in Paris, there’s no doubt your writing process includes suffering: the hours you spend gazing out the window, the inky splotches your fountain pen leaves on the vellum, the tear stains on the never-adequate rhymes, the crumpled drafts piling up on the floor.

Have you ever had your work edited by a grammar whiz and found a note scrawled in the margin reading “fused participle”? Like most people, you probably wondered what the heck that note meant. If you looked it up, you were confronted by a deluge of grammar terms—so you gave up. Don’t worry, we don’t blame you. It is confounding. But to write in formal prescriptive English, you must know what fused participles are and how to wrangle them.

Law is a high stress field. Lawyers finish school and descend into a meatgrinder in legal practice. The fast pace, high stakes, and need for perfection can overwhelm even the most skilled attorney. When clients are depending on you, every word counts. So how can a legal writer balance their responsibilities and their basic wellbeing? Attorney, author, and blogger Claire E. Parsons has faced these challenges head on, and has advice for other lawyers about their writing and their wellness.

What is your role and how did you get to where you are today?

I feel fortunate to have multiple roles at this stage of my career. I am as surprised by this as I am pleased about it. For my law practice, I am Of Counsel at Bricker Graydon in the Cincinnati area. I have been practicing for 15 years in the areas of school law, employment law, and litigation. I started in a smaller insurance defense firm with a strong focus on local government work. Though I started in civil litigation, I soon was asked to learn special education to meet client needs. I did that and quickly became known for my work and then moved more into general school law. I am fairly new at my current firm but I was drawn to the firm’s strong public sector and school law presence.

Language and Status: An Introduction to Two Schools of Thought

Language and status are closely intertwined. The language choices you make reveal information about your identity, background, and the formality of the situation. Two schools of thought influence our decisions on whether language use is “correct” or “incorrect:” prescriptivism and descriptivism.

It may seem efficient to use generative AI (GenAI) tools to write content for you. You’re busy. Maybe you’re not deeply invested in the final product. Maybe you just want to be done. However, GenAI often produces text that is bland, abstract, repetitive, obvious, and just awkward—especially compared to a human writer who knows the topic well.

The legal writing landscape evolves constantly, and lawyers and law professors alike must keep up. It's not just riding the wave of technological and linguist advancement, however. Professors like Susan Tanner of UofL Brandeis School of Law are shaping the future of legal writing. She shared her hopes for that future with us in the second half of her legal writing interview.

How would you like to see legal writing change in the next 10 years?

I’d like to see it get easier.

Admit it: You’re proud of your writing skills. They give you enviable power. You can wield English grammar and vocabulary like a sculptor’s chisel or a warrior’s axe. You’ve thrived in fields where your long, complex (but clear) sentences with lots of Latin syntax and vocabulary roots show your expertise. But what if, by setting these skills aside sometimes, you could make your writing even more powerful? What if you could have a greater effect on your audience by changing your writing style to better fit their needs? You can create more powerful and effective messages when you write in plain language. WordRake can help you achieve this transformation faster and more efficiently.

Dialog boxes often feel disruptive, but sometimes we’re so quick to dismiss dialog boxes that we miss key information. Some hidden gems are tucked away in WordRake’s dialog boxes.

WordRake’s complex algorithms are contextual—that’s what makes its editing suggestions so powerful and accurate. The algorithms operate using signals and triggers. So when you Rake a document and accept changes or otherwise edit the document, the available signals and triggers change. When you Rake a second time, WordRake might make additional editing suggestions your new wording revealed.