Miscite your authorities. Get the volume of the reporter right, but forget page numbers. Close enough is good enough, unless your goal is to lose by winning. If a decision is longer than one page, never give the pinpoint citation. Your goal is to make it so difficult for the judge to find any morsel of accuracy that the judge will turn to your adversary’s brief.
Jury instructions are too often so poorly written that even the most intelligent juror cannot understand them. That’s a serious problem. So how can we make jury instructions more understandable? Prof. Peter Tiersma offers many concrete suggestions in this article, available for free download on SSRN. If you’re a trial judge or trial lawyer, you need to read it.
This blog's official position on split infinitives is that they're okay. The Star Trek catch phrase - 'to boldly go' - as A-okay with us. But please, please don't use your freedom from the no-split-infinitives superstition to write a sentence like this:
'Is it kosher for a law enforcement agency to, pursuant to a lawfully granted search warrant, search your G-mail account without telling you?' [Wall Street Journal Law Blog].
If you’d rather write your summary-judgment motions with the goal of having them granted, then you’ll benefit from reading Michael Reitzell’s article, Focus on the Material Facts for a Successful Motion for Summary Judgment. Michael gives good advice not only on how to focus your motion on the facts that matter, but also on how to respond to an opposition loaded with irrelevant factual assertions. The article is written from a defendant’s perspective, but its advice applies just as well to a plaintiff’s summary-judgment motion.
Legal writers often must use terms of art—technical words or phrases unique to a profession. Sometimes these terms come from the legal profession; sometimes they come from other professions, such as medical or engineering. But they all have one thing in common: not everyone knows what they mean. So to make sure that your reader understands a term of art in your writing, define it.
You can define terms of art unobtrusively, without interrupting the flow of your writing. To learn how, read Robert Fugate’s recent article in the Texas Bar Journal, Defining Terms of Art in Legal Writing.
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning). [Wikipedia]
Even though the legal profession depends heavily on writing, legal typography is often poor. Some blame lies with the strict typographic constraints that control certain legal documents (e.g. court rules regarding the format of pleadings). But the rest of the blame lies with lawyers. To be fair, I assume this is for lack of information, not lack of will. This website tries to fill that void. There are numerous guides on typography for generalists available but none specifically aimed at lawyers. This website is an ongoing work, with pieces being added as I write them.
The (new) legal writer blog, has a post featuring an article by Raymond P. Ward, titled Techniques for Emphasis and De-Emphasis. The full article can be viewed here. The author makes his case by comparing Justice Scalia's written opinion with Justice Stevens' written opinion in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002). Ward shares his suggestions on effective and persuasive by example and further states:Good writers don’t need typographic gimmicks to pack their prose with power. Good writers do something else, too: they manipulate the number of sentences to increase or decrease the number of stress positions.
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