If you listen to outsiders and many practicing lawyers, you may believe that legal writing is just a task to get through as quickly as possible. You may even believe that oral argument is the real lawyering.

Throat-clearing phrases are empty openers that delay the presentation of your argument. They slow down sentences, waste space, and frustrate readers. These phrases make the reader dig for the point, and some readers will give up before they find it.

The Illusion and Appeal of LLM Reasoning

Words like reasoning, thinking, and writing are the working tools of the legal profession. But with the rise of large language models, like OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, these words are now used in a different way. If we don’t confront their false familiarity, we risk misunderstanding the capabilities of these tools and misplacing our trust in them.

Even if you are a highly experienced legal writer, you will face times when a brief scares you. Though writing is daily work for many lawyers, critical briefs can temporarily take over our lives and minds. Unfortunately, not all briefs bend easily to your will. Sometimes the legal issues are novel, the factual issues don’t align perfectly with the law, or maybe a client issue in the background adds extra stress. Any of these situations is enough to induce fear in the lawyer charged with writing the winning brief.

Every generation of senior lawyers complains that junior lawyers can’t write. But becoming a lawyer takes years of post-secondary education and apprenticeship, so it’s not reasonable to interpret this complaint to mean young lawyers are illiterate. So what’s the source of this perennial complaint and how can we address it?

Judges have long voiced their frustrations over verbose, confusing court briefs. And as noted in a previous blog, some courts have tightened their word limits to guard against long-winded briefs. So what can you do to make sure that your briefs are not only readable, but powerful? Professor Mark Cooney, who explained the problem of rejected legal documents in his last post, here offers ten tips for clear briefs that you can feel confident submitting to the court.

1. Sue 'em!

Prefer the simple sue or sued to elaborate alternatives. In the sentences below, for example, courts used four or five words — even six words — to say what sue or sued would’ve said in one:

Legal ghostwriters help trial lawyers save time and money. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ghostwriting is writing for someone considered the author. This practice is prevalent in the legal field.

If you asked me to describe what I did last summer, I’d write an essay about exploring, in greater depth, the pitfalls of legalese. My research revealed that inflated diction, jargon, wordiness, and rambling sentences have unraveled legal documents across the country. So lawyers should by wary of forms afflicted by dense, impenetrable text. The proof is in the cases.

Legal writing often feels formulaic. It follows established patterns and uses predictable structures. But those formulas exist for good reason. Predictable structures help legal readers—judges, lawyers, clerks, and other professionals—quickly understand the argument, locate key facts, and process information. Legal readers rely on them for cognitive shortcuts to handle their caseloads.

The Tale of the Tape

In one corner, WordRake: editing software with more than 50,000 editing algorithms designed to improve clarity in professional prose.

To write effectively, you must know your message before you start. Planning your pitch is the first step to writing for your audience. Everything before this stage serves you, not the reader.

Regardless of practice area, document creation consumes a significant portion of every lawyer’s time. According to Thomson Reuters, up to 60% of lawyer time is spent on writing, editing, and proofreading. Even after the first draft is complete, editing and proofreading can drag on for hours—and sometimes errors still slip through the cracks.

The issue statement is the first substantive content in a legal brief.^[1] It’s also the first opportunity to shape how the court and its staff view our case. So the last thing we want is for readers to struggle or lose sight of our message.

Before the first day of your 1L year, you probably spent 30 minutes reading one page of a 17th century case (and dreaded having to read nine more before class). If you were anything like me, you sighed and consulted Black’s Law Dictionary to decipher the terminology combined in doublets and triplets—and were often disappointed to find the words were near-synonyms or out of use. You rightly identified these terms as archaic and redundant. But by the end of your 3L year, you were unfazed by the English, French, and Latin terms mixed within dense blocks of text. You could even understand what you read and use it to argue for classroom clients! You were ready to enter the profession, thinking and writing like a lawyer.

One misconception about editing is that it’s simply a function of time—that if given the same document and the same block of time, everybody would spot the same edits. That’s not true. Effective editors train themselves to spot specific edits. That is, they go into every editorial session knowing how wordiness usually arises and how to fix it. With practice and experience, those fixes become editorial reflexes.

Legal dramas are full of hot-headed lawyers overflowing with righteous indignation, ready to steamroll injustice by the force of their convictions. The courtroom scenes play out with biting repartee and shouts of “objection!” until at last the verdict is revealed, and the “good guys” walk away with their hard-earned, well-deserved victory. Opposing counsel glares as our heroic lawyer marches triumphantly to a waiting crowd of excited reporters and shares the good news.

As paralegals, time is money. Our days are filled with multitasking and responding to attorney and client demands. We appreciate the latest and greatest software that helps us perform with speed and accuracy. It’s necessary to pick software that fits our writing needs and expedites the process of producing legal documents. But we must also know how to use our software to its full potential so we can get the most benefit from it, in turn benefiting our clients.

Paralegals with excellent writing skills know the importance of editing and proofreading their work. After all, clear and effective legal documents are more than words on a page—they can shape opinions and influence lives.

Legal writing requires the ability to present clear and persuasive arguments, which is why legal briefs need effective organization and structure. Two tools for enhancing the persuasive power of a brief are the Table of Contents (ToC) and point headings. By leveraging technology and honing organizational skills, lawyers can improve the clarity, coherence, and impact of their writing. Technology can simplify creating, organizing, and editing legal briefs so you can focus on finding the most persuasive arguments. In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of large- and small-scale organization and how to achieve it, as well as technology tools to help you construct a better legal brief.

Effective legal writing involves connecting compelling arguments with cited support from relevant legal authorities. A clear understanding of these authorities’ hierarchy amplifies the persuasive strength of your assertions. Mastering tools like the Table of Authorities (TOA) in Microsoft Word can improve your productivity. Combining legal writing skills with technological assistance elevates the quality of your work, ensures adherence to court timelines, and helps you concentrate on your argumentation.

Legal and business writing require a blend of precision, clarity, persuasion, and organization. With so many necessary elements, most legal and business documents are long and require more structure—for writers and readers—than a typical document. For writers, structure helps you maintain focus while crafting document content; for readers, structure guides them through the document and helps them see logical connections. Structure supports understanding, so finding ways to easily implement and adhere to structure will help you improve substance.

A strong legal case needs paralegals with strong writing skills: a paralegal’s writing sets the foundation for important legal documents, which can impact case outcomes. Unfortunately, wordiness and lack of clarity can easily become bad writing habits for paralegals. Intentional word choice and editing can turn your writing from mediocre and rambling to powerful and precise. In this article, we’ll cover a few sources of wordy habits and keys to good legal writing.

Traditional, honorable, and deferential are common descriptors for communication in the legal profession. Each word conjures thoughts of the formal and respectful tone which is used throughout legal writing—especially pleadings like briefs, motions, declarations, and responses. Embracing formality in legal writing does not require dense legalese or overly complex language, but it does require excluding casual expressions or colloquialisms.

Though we may be hired to interpret and apply the law, our clients rely on our writing skills to accurately capture their intent. It’s irresponsible to discount punctuation rules as pedantic and useless. Lawyers must get three comma rules right:

Even when we’re working in the same building, we rarely interact the people we work with in person and in real time. Now that we’re working from home, we’re relying on email more and more. Aside from a few Zoom conversations, your email writing style and etiquette may be the only thing a senior partner knows of you.

In middle school, we memorized vocabulary lists to learn new words and build our reading comprehension. In high school, we memorized vocabulary lists to prepare for college entrance exams. In law school, we memorized legal terms for cold calls and final exams. Success at these tedious memorization exercises led to academic accolades and bragging rights. After years of indoctrination, it’s no surprise that we would believe that a large vocabulary would impress readers. But if you believe that, you’d be wrong.

Though we continue to write legal memos as though they will be read on printed paper, that expectation no longer holds. Even before the recent shift to working remotely, email had become the primary method of business communication and email memos the vehicle to share legal analysis. Now the screen of the electronic device on which we read provides our structure, context, and limitations—we no longer rely on the printed page for this information.

As Gary Kinder wrote in The Perfect Brief Part 11 - Polishing Your Brief, you should never use tricks to squeeze a brief into a word or page limit. It’s unethical and judges will notice—they’ve seen every trick we can imagine.

For our final installment on The Perfect Brief, we offer a list you can quickly peruse to ensure you have checked all of the elements in your brief to make it the most convincing document you can put before a judge.

A polished document encourages a generous reading, so review to correct mistakes, shorten the brief, and generally make the judge’s job easier. Below are several ideas to ensure that what we send to the court is our best work and enhances our reputation with the judge.

Over centuries, these false notions have grown to dominate a litigation practice and stuff our briefs with the results of unsavory habits. We aim to dispel them, so you can deliver to the court your most persuasive brief.

When you craft tight and convincing paragraphs, you leave your opponent no room to break into the flow of your argument. This requires recognizing the specific roles played by facts and opinions and asking the right follow up questions to uncover weaknesses.

To get a judge immersed in our story, we must capture the judge’s imagination. By using descriptive language that engages the senses, we invite a judge to experience our client’s plights from our client’s perspective.

Stories take a judge to the heart of our dispute. They let the judge see our client’s plight, empathize with our client, and want to decide for our client. By telling a story, we say to the judge, “Your Honor, here is what this case is really all about.”

Editing is a difficult task with many interconnected pieces. It requires that we know and apply writing, grammar, and style principles to complex topics. And some writing professors have found that even if you have vast knowledge of grammar, syntax, and style, you’ll still need help to apply that knowledge and thoroughly edit a piece of writing. Otherwise, you’ll either get overwhelmed with too much information or you won’t be able to remember enough to put the rules into practice while editing.

Because presenting our work in a clear and pleasing manner is so important, effective legal writers devote 35% of their time in any legal writing task to revising, editing, proofreading, and otherwise polishing the document.

As a judge reads our facts, she will form an opinion. When she finishes, often she has already decided the case. She will appreciate our argument to help her frame her opinion, but what motivates her is the story we tell and how we tell it. She already knows what the law says; she doesn’t know the facts. If we properly develop and present those Facts, argument becomes almost unnecessary.

Editing is the process of improving content, clarity, structure, and substance. It involves checking the content of the text to ensure that the ideas are expressed clearly and logically, and form a coherent and meaningful whole. It should be the first task you undertake after you have a fairly complete document. (Save the proofreading for later.) The purpose of editing is to make your document better. Here’s what to check:

The perfect brief requires keen investigation and shrewd fact-gathering. The better facts we gather, the better story we can tell the judge, and the more persuasive our brief. No brief can exceed the quality of its facts—so invest in finding the right facts. Unfortunately, in law school we learn to present facts like a news reporter, but not to find them like an investigative journalist. 

Before we write an introduction, we should think about its purpose and ask ourselves a question:

Do we even need an introduction?

Judges, mediators, and other decision-makers live with major distractions. We need to capture their attention in the first sentence. Too often, we use that opening sentence—and sometimes several paragraphs—to overwhelm the judge with minutiae or to present the other side’s case.

As we discussed last time, the more we stay within the bounds of judicial decorum and decency, the more likely we are to prevail. If we let ethics guide our brief-writing, the system wins, the profession wins, society wins, and our client is more likely to win. If being respectful and diligent in our briefs had no upside, we could not in good faith recommend it; but beneath any discussion about how to write a brief lies a dependable truth: Our approaching brief-writing with “fairness” in mind is much better for our clients.

Carving two or three hours out of our meeting-filled, media-riddled day to focus on starting a memorandum is nearly impossible. But we can usually preserve pockets of 20 to 30 minutes. Don’t assume such a short chunk of time is worthless—21 minutes is all you need to get started. This article will help you quickly write a first draft that can become an impressive memo.

In a blog titled “Words That Can Ruin Your Sentence,” Dictionary.com calls the unnecessary words we speak “crutch words.” In a recent tweet headlined “Words de Doom,” Appellate Twitter calls unnecessary words we write “verbal tics.” Whatever we call them, we use unnecessary words for a reason: when speaking, it’s to give ourselves time to think about what we want to say next—so, well, actually—when writing, it’s usually because we don’t know they’re unnecessary.

Today and each week for the next 12 weeks, the lawyers at WordRake will explore the most ubiquitous form of a law practice—brief-writing: from the ethics to the psychology, to introducing your case, gathering your facts, presenting the facts, building arguments, persuading judges, and proofreading to make your brief the best you can make it in the time you have. We will give you checklists and teach you techniques you can learn only at WordRake from lawyers who have taught tens of thousands of litigators how to win more cases; even how to get that first draft down in 21 minutes. Our goal is to make your professional life easier by helping you understand the whole process at a deeper level—what really moves a judge to say, “Yes.”

Advice to improve your legal writing can sound flippant. How often have you heard “rules” like these?

The memorandum opening below was written by a partner at a big firm. It is filled with examples of two of the three categories of "memo language" we discussed last week. The two paragraphs total 155 words. Start by removing the "obvious" statements and the sentences used to "explain the organization." Then see if you can reduce what remains to about 30 words.

Last week, in Part 6 of the WordRake series How to Write the Perfect Memorandum, we explained how to keep clients happy by opening a substantive email with your conclusion and suggested action. In the short installment this week, we show how and why to remove the thick wads of "memo language" that prevent your reader from understanding the situation or knowing what to do about it.

Last week, in Part 5 of the WordRake series How to Write the Perfect Memorandum, we looked at the Issue Memorandum, which considers the facts and the law in assessing a client's case. This week, we discuss how to introduce a substantive email to a client. 

In Part 4 of the WordRake series How to Write the Perfect Memorandum, we looked at the Advisory Memorandum, the backbone of a transactional practice. This week, we parse the most complex of memoranda—the Issue Memorandum, which assesses the strength of a client's case.

We've now discussed the writing assignment, compared the three primary memoranda, and explained the simplest of the three: the Survey. Today, we look at the memorandum you're more likely write in a transactional practice, the Advisory Memorandum.

We've now discussed how to accept a writing assignment from an assigning lawyer; and we've compared the three primary memoranda an assigning lawyer will ask you to write: the Survey, the Advisory Memorandum, and the Issue Memorandum. Today, we examine the shortest and simplest of the three, the Survey.

Last week, we covered how to accept a writing assignment. Now we look at the three categories of memoranda written to partners.

In this seven-part series, the WordRake legal team explores the three categories of law office memoranda and how to write each to an assigning lawyer. We also reveal the secrets to introducing and streamlining client memoranda for a client’s quick understanding. From receiving the assignment to editing your final draft for brevity and clarity, you will learn how to create and organize memoranda that impress assigning lawyers and satisfy discerning clients.