Here are the remaining 5 tips from Presiding Justice Arthur Gilbert of the Second District Court of Appeal, Division 6. In A Brief Browse on Briefs: Writing Tips from a Judge (part 1) and part 2, we gave the first 10 of 15 writing tips from the judge .
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Last week, in A Brief Browse on Briefs: Writing Tips from a Judge (part 1), we gave the first of 5 of 15 writing tips from Presiding Justice Arthur Gilbert of the Second District Court of Appeal, Division 6. Here comes — you guessed it — 5 more writing tips gleaned from the judge’s years of experience [...]
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Writing briefs — indeed, writing generally — is an area in which most attorneys can use help or at least a refresher. In a recent case (.pdf), some attorneys learned this the hard way when the judge called their grammatical errors ”so egregious and obvious that an average fourth grader would have avoided most of them.” Those attorneys [...]
Filed under: Civil Litigation, Legal Topics, Legal Writing, Practice of Law | Tagged: legal briefs, writing tips | 4 Comments »
One of the essential qualities of all legal writing, clarity, is created by a clear train of thought. No matter how clear your sentences are, readers will not feel that they add up to a clear message unless they can see how the sentences hang together. It is your job as a writer to bring [...]
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Too many lawyers write in a style not persuasive to a busy judge. We learned this unpersuasive style in college and law school – it’s called the academic style. Academic style is marked by mind-numbing details, bloated sentences, and meandering paragraphs. Exactly what you don’t want when writing for a judge.
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Persuasive sentences make for a persuasive brief. The following six tips will allow your readers to easily sail through your briefs as you persuade them along the way. 1. Omit needless words. Omit words that do no useful work, including adjectives or adverbs that mean the same as the nouns or verbs they modify (e.g., [...]
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As more courts are requiring or permitting electronic filing (see Cal Rules of Ct 8.212(c)(2)), briefs will be increasingly read online. The ABA Journal reports that even Supreme Court Justices Kagan and Scalia are using electronic readers to read briefs on the go. Because reading documents online differs in some significant ways from reading hard copies, [...]
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This post is adapted from an article written for CEB by attorney Mary-Christine (“M.C.”) Sungaila. Using basic storytelling principles from creative writing can inform and improve legal writing. In a recent blog post, we discussed building a brief like building a story, from the characters to the language. In this post, we focus more on drafting [...]
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This post is adapted from an article written for CEB by attorney Mary-Christine (“M.C.”) Sungaila. Good writing—whatever its form—is good storytelling. Although legal briefs have a different purpose than fiction or creative nonfiction, basic storytelling principles from creative writing can inform and improve legal writing. Here are the first five of ten techniques from creative [...]
Filed under: Legal Writing, Practice of Law | Tagged: briefs, legal writing | 1 Comment »
