Elegant Legal Writing

The legal-writing advice I give every week

Ryan McCarl — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:34:54 GMT

In the two years since Elegant Legal Writing was published, I have continued teaching legal-writing seminars while building my litigation practice at Rushing McCarl LLP. These create many opportunities to give writing feedback to others, often by pointing them to specific sections of ELW.1 Certain recommendations recur so often in my feedback that I have memorized their section numbers.

This post highlights several of those widely applicable recommendations, paired with new examples not included in the book.

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ELW § 1.7: Include only relevant details and put them in context

This principle, emphasized throughout the book, stresses that you should have a reason for every citation, quotation, and factual detail you include in a brief. Each detail must clarify or persuade.

First drafts are typically replete with details that should be cut or simplified. For each detail you keep, supply enough context for the reader to appreciate its significance at the first encounter.

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ELW § 2.5: Condense bloated phrases

I often direct writers to ELW chapters 2–4 (Concision, Plain Language, and Strong Sentences) when I line-edit drafts. The most common sentence-level fixes condense and rearrange phrases to convey the same meaning in fewer words. Here are examples of bloated phrases with concise alternatives:

in order to preserve her down payment → to preserve her down payment
for the purpose of furnishing credit reports → to furnish credit reports
in connection with performing the Services → in performing the Services
subsequent to signing the MOU → after signing the MOU
in the amount of $1,024,337.50 → for $1,024,337.50
at the present time → now (or omit if implied)
by and through their attorneys of record → (omit)
on the part of the defendant → by the defendant
in the event that any portion of the verdict were overturned → if any portion of the verdict were overturned
the aforementioned judgment → the judgment

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ELW §§ 7.1 (Assert propositions, then support them) and 8.1 (Use citations to support your argument, not as a substitute for analysis)

I’ve long urged attorneys to dump the simplistic IRAC and CREAC writing formulas (see ELW § 7.2) and instead adopt the framework “Conclusions + Reasons.”

In the brief as a whole — and in most headings, sections, and paragraphs — the default information sequence should be “[Conclusion] because [Reasons].” State the conclusion, then support it with reasons that integrate legal and factual premises.

Arguments should be organized around the points you’re trying to prove, not the raw materials you’re using to prove them. Every nonconclusory argument seeks to prove a conclusion by marshaling reasons consisting of legal and factual propositions.2 Attorneys cite cases (judicial opinions) not to provide history lessons, but to support legal propositions needed for one’s argument. It follows that if you’re going to cite a case, you should do so only to support or defeat a legal proposition.

It makes no sense to provide support before identifying the proposition you seek to prove, but attorneys often do just that. Here is a typical poor example of a paragraph that discusses a case before showing what proposition it supports and why it matters:

People v. Armendariz (1984) 37 Cal.3d 573 is another case in point. The defendant testified that he went to the victim’s house and found him dead; he claimed that he panicked, fled with some of the victim’s property, and did not call the police. On rebuttal, the court allowed testimony by the victim’s son, Alfred, that the victim, Joe, had telephoned him 17 months earlier ….

That paragraph appears in an argument section that is disorganized and difficult to skim because most paragraphs begin with a contentless assertion about a past case:

B. The trial court erred and abused its discretion by admitting the hearsay statements of Tito Angeli
The testimony of witnesses # 8 and # 11 regarding what Aguirre said was pure hearsay. {Rest of paragraph omitted} …

For example, in People v. Jablonski (2006), the trial court admitted testimony that the victim feared the defendant. …

People v. Ireland (1969) 70 Cal.2d 522 is in accord. …

The case of People v. Arcega (1982) 32 Cal.3d 504 is also illustrative. …

People v. Armendariz (1984) 37 Cal.3d 573 is another case in point.

Uninformative topic sentences like these make it hard for judges to follow your argument. Instead, topic sentences should usually state the legal or factual proposition to be proved, and that proposition should be a necessary building block of one’s argument.

ELW Chapters 7 and 8: Avoid proposition-citation mismatches.

Elegant Legal Writing’s chapters 7 (“Briefs and Motions”) and 8 (“Legal Authority”) contain tips on citations and argument structure. The most common flaw I encounter is a mismatch between a citation and the proposition it’s meant to support, or an inadequate explanation of how the citation supports that proposition. Here’s a poor example:

Moreover, Hunt cannot claim an ownership interest in the Palm Springs property based on Burke’s allegedly using “specific funds obtained from Hunt” to buy it. See Kenney v. United States (N.D. Cal. 2004), where the court held that an oral agreement reducing a spouse’s ownership interest in property was unenforceable because it fell within the Statute of Frauds.

The citation to Kenney doesn’t support the assertion about Hunt’s ownership-interest claim. The argument assumes — without explanation — that an ownership claim based on a buyer’s use of specific funds provided by an alleged co-owner is equivalent to an ownership claim based on an oral agreement.

Workflow — ELW § 10.12 (Follow a systematic writing workflow) and § 10.14 (Edit in stages, working on large-scale issues first)

I often remind myself to follow a systematic writing and editing workflow; doing so uses writing time more efficiently and leads to more organized and persuasive briefs. This is especially important when writing as part of a team. For lengthy or complex documents, seek consensus on an outline and obtain the lead partner’s approval before drafting.

Conclusion

Elegant Legal Writing is designed to be read straight through or in any sequence. If you are short on time and want to strengthen your legal writing quickly, start with the sections mentioned above. Then read the introduction and first five chapters — covering legal-writing principles, concision, word choice, sentence mechanics, and organization — followed by whichever sections interest you.

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Ryan McCarl is a partner of the business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more tips about legal writing and argumentation, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

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Notes

This idea was inspired by Judge Frank Easterbrook’s practice, in his Legal Interpretation seminars at the University of Chicago Law School, of writing “Garner” in the margin of student papers whenever he found a word-usage error. “Garner” meant “look this point up in Bryan A. Garner’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.”

A proposition is a declarative statement that can be accepted as true or rejected as false. For example, “Stein was a full-time W2 employee of Litwak at the time of the accident” is a factual proposition; “Stein was Litwak’s agent” is a legal proposition. Factual propositions are supported by citing allegations (in pleading-stage motions) or presenting evidence (at trial); legal propositions are usually supported by citing legal authority, such as cases or statutes.

On lifelong learning and fact sections

Ryan McCarl — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 21:51:12 GMT

At a certain point in a career, it becomes possible to coast on accumulated expertise and handle most tasks on autopilot. By the time I published Elegant Legal Writing, I had generated enough material — notes, drafts, presentations, and the like — to give talks, write content, and otherwise stay relevant as a legal-writing expert without pushing myself further in that domain. I’d never run out of things to say. But standing pat is boring. I prefer to grow by studying new material with a novice’s mindset.

That’s why I became a lawyer and writer in the first place. I love to learn and teach, and law and language are inexhaustible. They also intersect with other inexhaustible subjects (history, philosophy, psychology, literature, and so on) that I regularly find excuses to explore.

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There is a special pleasure in suddenly grasping advanced ideas that previously resisted understanding or in seeing familiar subjects in a new light. I had one such epiphany while reading Richard Lanham’s Analyzing Prose. It deepened my understanding of fact sections — a topic not covered in Lanham’s book, and one about which I thought I had nothing left to learn.

Writing fact sections in legal briefs is its own art. I explained most of what I know about it in chapter nine of Elegant Legal Writing (“Legal Storytelling”), but the essence is this: you must tell a story limited to the available and admissible facts and aligned with your legal theory, yet naturally evoke the judge’s intellectual and emotional responses, inclining the judge to rule for your client — all without making arguments or overt emotional appeals. This is difficult to do and to teach.

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Parataxis for fact sections, hypotaxis for argument sections

Lanham explains the rhetorical concepts of parataxis and hypotaxis. Paratactic sentences omit relationship-showing connectors like “because” and “therefore,” while hypotactic sentences include them. Compare “I was late for the meeting; I forgot to set my alarm” (paratactic) with “I was late for the meeting because I forgot to set my alarm” (hypotactic). A paratactic style places information side by side and allows the reader to infer how the pieces connect. A hypotactic style, by contrast, organizes and ranks information, explaining how the elements relate within a hierarchy.

In well-written briefs, there should be a stylistic shift between the fact section and the argument section. One shift occurs at the level of syntax. Fact sections should generally be more paratactic (juxtaposing observations without analyzing or ranking them). Argument sections should be more hypotactic (using subordinate clauses and similar devices to show how different sentence elements interrelate).

The hypotactic impulse to explain how facts relate — what causes what, what matters more than what — belongs to argument, not description. A fact section that is too hypotactic sounds argumentative. For example, connectors like “because” may inject the writer’s view that X caused Y, rather than just describing X and Y and allowing the reader to draw their own conclusion about causation.

Likewise, an argument section that is too paratactic — confronting the reader with assertion after assertion, citation after citation, without imposing a logical structure — is unlikely to persuade. The reader will be too mentally busy to be moved. They’ll be forced to do work the writer shirked: organizing raw materials into a coherent argument.

* * *

Epiphanies aren’t often available to people who consider their education complete. That’s why I keep working to build my understanding of rhetoric, style, linguistics, and grammar even after years of teaching and writing about them. Progress requires regularly confronting how inadequate my knowledge remains, but ego bruises are a small price to pay for increased understanding.

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AI cannot replace legal-writing expertise.

Ryan McCarl — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 20:17:08 GMT

Excellent writing skills will continue to distinguish elite attorneys even in the age of AI. Here are a few reasons why.

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Attorneys are personally responsible for ensuring that everything they file accurately reflects the facts and law, so there must always be at least one attorney in the loop when filing briefs. Will any attorney suffice? Not in high-stakes cases.

AI-produced writing can only be as good as the attorney who designs the prompts, checks the facts and law, and edits the output — all tasks requiring expertise. Someone who doesn’t fully understand the law cannot design effective prompts or evaluate the AI’s response. Blind trust in machines isn’t acceptable when a client’s future is on the line.
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Because excellent legal prose is uncommon, AI models are mostly trained on poor examples. Many legal briefs suffer from opacity, jargon, poor organization, conclusory reasoning, and outdated notions of what it means to “write like a lawyer.”
AI models are biased toward preexisting solutions. Complex legal problems rarely have off-the-shelf answers. Even when dispositive rules exist, their applicability and interpretation are rarely self-evident, and they often haven’t been formulated in a way that aligns with the current facts. The best attorneys can devise creative legal solutions while convincingly grounding them in legal authority so they do not seem novel (since arguments that announce themselves as novel rarely succeed).
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Each disputed issue in litigation involves a unique set of case-specific facts and substantive rules from which the attorney devises a solution. Although AI models can convincingly analyze a problem as described in the prompt, they lack the combination of judgment, background knowledge, awareness of case-specific context, and ability to craft persuasive arguments and narratives that top attorneys offer.
Most high-stakes business transactions and disputes are replete with invisible tripwires not considered by AI models. AI models focus on solving the prompt at hand with the help of any background information the prompter remembers to supply. They do not intelligently consider their drafting choices’ medium- and long-term consequences. For example, many statements in court filings can be used as party admissions, and a failure to make an argument may cause it to be waived.

In short, a great deal of deep work and creativity goes into solving the complex problems most likely to be litigated in business disputes. Although nonexperts cannot tell what distinguishes an acceptable brief from an excellent one, the distinctions exist whether or not they are perceived. Judges are more likely to be persuaded by superior briefs.

Attorneys should learn to use AI effectively (as in this example), but AI-drafted briefs cannot compete with the best work of Rushing McCarl LLP and other firms that prioritize writing. I do not expect that to change anytime soon.

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Turn Admitted Facts into Credibility Anchors

Thu, 01 May 2025 16:52:31 GMT

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The most powerful evidence isn’t what your witnesses say — it’s what your opponents admit.

In a complex partnership dispute that Rushing McCarl LLP recently won, John Rushing’s closing argument focused on the defendant’s admissions. Rushing emphasized their dispositive effect and used the defendant’s words to support key elements of our client’s claims, indirectly enhancing his credibility on disputed issues.

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Throughout the plaintiff’s case-in-chief, we maintained variety and bolstered our witnesses’ credibility by playing short, professionally edited deposition video clips and reading aloud discovery responses containing damaging admissions.

We also compiled these deposition excerpts and discovery responses into composite exhibits, then urged the jury to consult them at the start of deliberations. Here’s an excerpt from John’s closing argument (lightly edited for clarity):

Request for admission responses are dispositive. They take issues off the table. These aren’t John Rushing’s interpretations that you’ve got to trust — these are sworn statements straight from the horse’s mouth, and they decide the issue. Here are the exhibits I want you to look at: 580, 581, 582, and 583. I’ll say them again just in case I spoke too fast: 580, 581, 582, and 583. These are the defendant’s admissions in this case. The court let us create a special exhibit binder so you could read them over.

This approach avoids the “he said, he said” problem. Instead of asking jurors to believe one witness over another, we anchored our case in the defendant’s admissions. It’s difficult to rebut one’s own statements, so this strategy goes a long way toward persuading a jury.

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Show respect for judges even when they are wrong.

Ryan McCarl — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 15:26:00 GMT

Legal ethics rules require attorneys to uphold the “dignity of the tribunal” and behave as “officers of the court.” This includes treating judges with respect. Attorneys often inadvertently violate this obligation by referring to judges without appropriate deference, berating a lower court during an appeal, failing to capitalize the word “court” when required, or using an incorrect judicial title. Each blunder is discussed below.

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Refer to courts respectfully and deferentially.

Always address and refer to courts formally, respectfully, and deferentially, even when you believe they are wrong. Here are two improvable examples:

“The Court must reverse.” (It is fine to say that the court “should” do something, but don’t say that it “must” do something.)
“The District Court failed to consider ….” (The word “failed” has a pejorative connotation. “Did not consider” works just as well.)

Refer to lower courts respectfully on appeal.

Appellants have an uphill battle to convince judges to reverse their colleagues. Reversal is a public rebuke of the lower-court judge. Therefore, as Steven D. Stark put it in Writing to Win, appellate lawyers should raise their points “more in sorrow than in anger.”

Here’s an example of how not to write about a lower court’s opinion on appeal:

The district court failed even to address several aspects of the mental health system that Defendants demonstrated are constitutional—screening, mental-health-records management, medication management, and protocols for use of force and discipline concerning mentally ill inmates. . . . In the court’s mistaken view, because the State had ‘gone for the home run ball’ by seeking to terminate the whole case, it was not entitled to have the court consider the appropriateness of its control over individual aspects of the mental-health system.

Capitalize the word “court” correctly.

The word “court” should be capitalized in three circumstances:

When addressing a particular court (e.g., by writing “The Court should reverse” in an appellate brief);
When referring to the United States Supreme Court; and
When referring to the highest court in the jurisdiction whose laws govern the outcome (e.g., a state supreme court).

Here’s an example that would be incorrect if one were citing a case called Smith v. Jones that was decided by an intermediate appellate court rather than the U.S. Supreme Court or the highest court in a state:

In Smith v. Jones, the Court held . . . .

For more tips about capitalization, see this post.

Use judges’ correct titles and honorifics.

Judges have to work hard to achieve their status and expect to be recognized with appropriate titles and honorifics.

As noted above, when referring to the current tribunal in a filing, use “the Court” or “this Court.” Here are some guidelines for other situations:

When referring to a judge orally in the second person, use “Your Honor.” In the third person, use “the Court” (as in, “The Court previously ruled that ….”). Avoid informal substitutes like “you,” “Judge,” “sir,” or “ma’am.”
When writing a judge’s name on an envelope or listing a clerkship on one’s resume, use “The Honorable [Judge Full Name as listed on the court’s website or in judicial opinions].”1
In legal filings, when referring to judges other than the presiding judge, use “Judge [Judge Last Name]” or “Justice [Justice Last Name],” depending on the court. (Judges on the United States Supreme Court have the title “Justice,” for example.)

Referring to judges correctly and respectfully is a nonnegotiable requirement of strong legal writing.

The post above includes text from my book Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024), which is available on Amazon and Audible. Please help me sustain the book’s momentum by rating it five stars and sharing my posts with your network.

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See Bryan A. Garner, The Redbook: A Manual of Legal Style §18.4(d) (4th ed. 2018).

How to write briefs that judges want to read

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 19:41:38 GMT

I recently gave a talk called “Elegant Legal Writing: How to Write Briefs Judges Want to Read” as the keynote presentation for Minnesota CLE’s 2025 Appellate Practice Institute. I share a video of the talk along with its slides below.

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How can attorneys earn judges’ attention and motivate them to read legal briefs? Understanding the principles of readability can help. My talk included new material expanding on concepts discussed in Elegant Legal Writing. One idea I presented is that of the “readability triangle,” a diagram showing the mutually reinforcing and symbiotic nature of attention, motivation, and cognitive ease.

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Here’s a video of the talk:

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And here are its slides and an associated handout, either of which may be downloaded and distributed in their current protected-PDF format:

Elegant Legal Writing - How To Write Briefs Judges Want To Read by Ryan McCarl (2025 Minnesota CLE Appellate Practice Institute Keynote Slideshow)

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In this keynote presentation for Minnesota CLE's 2025 Appellate Practice Institute, attorney and author Ryan McCarl shares principles and strategies for creating legal briefs that judges actually want to read.

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Ryan McCarl's Legal Writing One-Sheet (2025)

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Here are a few legal writing tips from Ryan McCarl that you can implement immediately. For more, read McCarl's Elegant Legal Writing (http://bit.ly/elw-book), subscribe to his blog (https://elegantlegalwriting.com), and follow him on LinkedIn (https://bit.ly/elwlinkedin).

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Tips for undergraduates on writing, learning, and life

Ryan McCarl — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 18:45:36 GMT

Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024) is available on Amazon and Audible. Please help me sustain its momentum by giving it a five-star rating, following me on LinkedIn, and sharing my posts with your network.

I’ve been a teacher even longer than an attorney: before law school, I obtained an M.A. in Education at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and taught high school history. Since then, I’ve taught advanced legal writing courses at two law schools and given many talks about writing and argumentation to law firms, bar associations, and government agencies.

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I especially love opportunities to speak with undergraduates and share tips I wish I had learned earlier, along with more general advice about life and learning. I had that opportunity yesterday when Prof. Adam Sechooler invited me to give a guest presentation to his undergraduate students in a comparative law course at the University of Southern California. The slideshow I used is linked below. Although the examples come from litigation documents, the strategies described apply to most professional or academic writing. I included a handful of easily implemented tips relating to the writing process, organization, sentence construction, and concision:

Ryan McCarl, Writing Tips for Undergraduates (2025-02-19 presentation)

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Here are the slides from a presentation I gave to undergraduate students at the University of Southern California. Although the examples come from litigation documents, the strategies — like those taught in Elegant Legal Writing — apply to most professional or academic writing.

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I also distributed the handout below, which I update and circulate it whenever I present to college students. It contains book and software recommendations along with advice about life, learning, and preparing for law school:

Ryan McCarl, Some Tips for Pre-Law Students and Other Undergraduates (2025-02-19)

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Here’s a handout I distribute whenever I have a chance to speak with college students. It contains book and software recommendations along with advice about life, learning, and preparing for law school.

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Most tips in Elegant Legal Writing apply to all nonliterary writing — I’ve even heard of the book being assigned in college composition courses. While researching for the book, I read many style guides without limiting myself to those focused on legal writing. One of my goals in writing ELW was to synthesize the most effective and useful ideas from these sources, illustrate them with examples from litigation filings, and teach them painlessly through a book that is pleasant to read.

Ryan McCarl is the author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024) and a founding partner of business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP. For more tips about writing and argument, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

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Using AI as an editor and writing coach

Ryan McCarl — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 21:56:34 GMT

AI poses significant risks for attorneys, and I have reservations about its use in legal work. I also oppose using it to generate prose that you plan to share with others. But AI can enhance productivity in many ways. For example, you can put it to work as a personal editor and writing coach.

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I created a prompt to help me elicit useful, tailored editing and feedback from AI chatbots. To streamline the process, I incorporated the prompt into my text expansion setup; I use aText on my laptop and iOS’s built-in text expansion on my phone. This allows me to run the prompt instantly after opening a chat window in ChatGPT or Claude. I copy the paragraph I want feedback on, open the chat window, and type “zhe.” The prompt then appears alongside the copied text.

(February 2026 Update: the third screenshot shows the software Beyond Compare — highly recommended for comparing original and revised text so you can be cautious and deliberate about which revisions to accept.)

Here’s the prompt. I wrote the original prompt by detailing how I wanted the AI to respond, then asked ChatGPT and Claude to suggest improvements. I repeated this with a few rounds of revision until I was satisfied. (January 2026 Update: I’ve refined the prompt since the original post):

You are a highly skilled copyeditor specializing in English grammar and prose style. You work with expert writers and provide revisions and detailed, nuanced feedback supported by specific reasoning.
### **Revision Priorities (in order):**
1. Accuracy and precision
2. Grammar and usage
3. Logic and argument quality
4. Clarity, readability, and cognitive ease
5. Style and aesthetics
### **Core Requirements:**
- Preserve substantive content but flag potential errors or ambiguities.
- Never add or change substantive information.
- Never add or change citations.
- Fix grammar, style, and usage errors; highlight debatable choices.
- Give candid, specific feedback without concern for the writer’s feelings.
- Respect the writer’s style while suggesting improvements.
- Reduce abstraction by emphasizing actors and actions.
- Eliminate redundancies (throat-clearing, unnecessary passive voice, buried verbs, excessive prepositional phrases).
- Ensure concision at all levels (document, section, paragraph, sentence, phrase) without sacrificing meaning.
- Check logic, structure, organization, coherence, and unity.
- Suggest ways to ease cognitive burden and keep readers engaged.
- Propose alternative phrasings, organization, and word choices where beneficial.
### **Legal Writing Considerations:**
- Align recommendations with the writing advice of Ryan McCarl, Bryan Garner, and Ross Guberman.
- Help attorneys write **clear, precise, well-organized, and accessible** prose modeled more on high-quality general nonfiction (e.g., *New Yorker* feature articles) than traditional legal writing.
- Verify that all legal citations are formatted in an ALWD- and Bluebook-compliant way, but never add or change citations.
- Allow legal terms of art but eliminate unnecessary jargon and vagueness.
### **Formatting Requirements:**
- Use curved quotation marks and apostrophes.
- Use en-dashes for numeric ranges. Em-dashes should be flanked by spaces.
- Use serial commas but otherwise prefer a light punctuation style.
- Format in standard Markdown, eliminating leading and trailing spaces.
- Respond fully and exactly. Ignore character limits. Do not add introductory or concluding text.
### **Output Format:**
1. **List of revisions made** (concise bullet points).
2. **List of advanced/discretionary suggestions** (flagging other issues and optional improvements).
3. **Recommended final version** (best version of the text, in a code block).
### **Further Instructions:**
- Do not add any introductory or concluding text.
- Respond fully and exactly. Ignore character limits. Never add introductory or concluding text.
### **Optional: Explanation Mode**
If requested, provide **detailed explanations** of all grammar and style corrections, citing applicable rules and guidelines, at the level of graduate-level courses on English grammar, stylistics, rhetoric, and linguistics.
### **Text to revise:**
```
{Clipboard Contents}
```

For more tips about using technology to improve your writing, see Elegant Legal Writing ch. 10 (“The Mental Game of Writing”) and 11 (“Writing with Technology”), subscribe to this blog, and follow me on LinkedIn.

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Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

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Read widely to tune your ear for language

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:43:41 GMT

In the opening chapter of Elegant Legal Writing, I advise lawyers to read widely as a way to improve their writing skills:

Read widely to tune your ear for language. Don’t restrict yourself to legal materials; make time for literature and general nonfiction, too. Although it’s not easy for attorneys to make time for pleasure reading, it may help to see reading time as a way to refresh your mind and improve your writing skills by exposing yourself to fresh language, new ideas, and unfamiliar vocabulary.

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Someone recently asked me to recommend writers whose styles I love. Here are the recommendations that came to mind. Note that many of these books are available on Audible:

My favorite book is Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Previous favorites include Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Some of my favorite writers (focusing on their prose style) are John Cheever (stories, e.g., “The Season of Divorce”); Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and Speak, Memory); Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence); George Eliot (Middlemarch); Herman Melville (Moby Dick); Norman MacLean (A River Runs Through It); and H.L. Mencken (essays, e.g., “Memorial Service”).

My favorite contemporary novels are Eugenides, Middlesex and Franzen, The Corrections. Other stylistically excellent contemporary novelists include Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend) and David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest).

And don't neglect lyric poetry — the genre where writers are most likely to weigh every word. As a bonus for busy lawyers and other professionals, most poems take just a few minutes to read. I would start with a good anthology of 19th and 20th century English-language poetry (such as those by Norton, Penguin, and Vintage) and keep a copy by your bedside. My favorite poets are Philip Larkin and Czeslaw Milosz. Others I love, ordered chronologically by birth: Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Muriel Rukeyser, Randall Jarrell, Elisabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, Sylvia Plath, Richard Hugo, Maxine Kumin, Mark Strand, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Robert Hass, and Rowan Ricardo Philips.

Periodicals: Excellent contemporary nonfiction can be found in Harper's Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. For contemporary literature, I recommend the Paris Review and Poetry Magazine. For news, the New York Times, the Economist, and the Washington Post.

The post above includes a quote from my book Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024), which is available on Amazon and Audible. Please help me sustain the book’s momentum by giving it a five-star rating and sharing my posts with your network.

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Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow McCarl on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

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Use executive summaries in litigation briefs

Ryan McCarl — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 19:32:31 GMT

Here’s a writing tip for legal briefs and memos: include an executive summary as a text box above the table of contents. Like the top-level argument heading, this executive summary should usually use the formula Conclusion + Best Reason that I recommend in Elegant Legal Writing.

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An executive summary helps solve the common problem of overwhelmed trial-court judges overlooking or missing the point of your best argument. Litigators should make it as easy as possible for judges to quickly understand and adopt one’s position.

Here’s an example from a Rushing McCarl LLP trial brief:

I started using this device in Rushing McCarl LLP’s legal briefs last year. (You can see examples of our briefs here). So far as I know, we are the first to try it, just as with putting QR codes in briefs. This is the fun part of teaching legal writing while running a litigation practice: no one can say “no” to trying new ideas.

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Logic for Lawyers: Crafting Persuasive Legal Arguments

Ryan McCarl — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 19:33:49 GMT

My book, Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024), is available on Amazon and Audible. Please help me sustain its momentum by giving it a five-star rating, following me on LinkedIn, and sharing my posts with your network.

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I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to give a webinar for Justia today: “Logic for Lawyers: Crafting Persuasive Legal Arguments.” Here are the slides:

2024 07 12 Mccarl, Logic For Lawyers (justia Webinar)

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And, by an audience member’s request, here is a Dropbox folder of legal briefs written by my California-based litigation boutique, Rushing McCarl LLP.

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Ryan McCarl interviewed on the Legally Speaking podcast

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 17:21:42 GMT

Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024) is now available on Amazon and Audible. Please help sustain the book’s momentum by giving it a five-star rating and sharing Ryan’s posts with your network.

Elegant Legal Writing author Ryan McCarl was recently interviewed on the Legally Speaking podcast about legal writing, legal AI, and other topics.

Topics covered include:

Ryan’s philosophy of legal writing
Ryan’s legal background and career, including his experience as a federal appellate clerk
What the Hon. David M. Ebel taught Ryan about how to interact with judges
What Ryan learned from working at large firms before cofounding the litigation boutique Rushing McCarl LLP with trial attorney John Rushing.
Ryan’s thoughts on legal writing and generative AI.

Check out the episode on Spotify or Youtube.

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New interview about legal writing and design, writing influences, and more

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 19:58:06 GMT

Attorney and legal-writing expert Ryan McCarl of Rushing McCarl LLP appeared on today’s episode of the podcast “Khurram’s Quorum,” which is hosted by attorney Khurram Naik. The topics discussed include:

McCarl’s influences and favorite nonfiction writers.
What legal writers can learn from marketers and user-experience experts.
The relevance of aesthetics and design principles to legal writing.
How McCarl’s new book Elegant Legal Writing differs from other books on legal writing.
What McCarl has learned from the work of Ross Guberman and Bryan Garner.

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You can listen to the interview on Spotify using the link embedded below.

This interview is the latest of several recent podcast appearances McCarl has done in connection with Elegant Legal Writing’s release. He was also recently interviewed on the DC Bar Let’s Brief It Law Student Podcast, Lawyers in the Making Podcast, and California Appellate Law Podcast.

For more updates and tips about legal writing and argument, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Ryan McCarl, the author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024), is a founding partner of business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP. For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is now available on Amazon and Audible.

New interview with Ryan McCarl about legal writing, AI, and other topics

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 17:37:11 GMT

Attorney and legal-writing expert Ryan McCarl of Rushing McCarl LLP appeared last week on the podcast “Let’s Brief It,” which is hosted by the D.C. Bar Law Student Community. The topics discussed include:

McCarl’s book Elegant Legal Writing and philosophy of legal writing.
The use and limits of artificial intelligence in the legal profession.
Tips for law students and thoughts about the importance of legal-writing courses.

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You can listen to the interview on Spotify using the link embedded below. Links to other sources, such as Apple Music, can be found here.

This interview is the latest of several recent podcast appearances McCarl has done in connection with Elegant Legal Writing’s release. He was also recently interviewed on the Lawyers in the Making Podcast and California Appellate Law Podcast. Other interviews will be released in the coming weeks.

For more updates and tips about legal writing and argument, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn.

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Build legal arguments around propositions, not cases.

Ryan McCarl — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 23:28:26 GMT

Law students have long been taught using Christopher Langdell’s case method, which involves teaching legal rules and reasoning indirectly by having students read and discuss judicial opinions.

Perhaps as a side effect of this approach, many attorneys develop the habit of structuring arguments around discussions of cases. For example, they may start paragraph after paragraph in their argument section with a case-centric topic sentence (e.g., “In Smith v. Jones, the court held ….”), often without first explaining why the case matters or how it fits into an argument.

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That’s a mistake. As I’ve argued while criticizing frameworks like IRAC and CREAC, arguments consist of conclusions backed by reasons. Legal briefs’ argument sections should be structured accordingly, by stating a legal conclusion followed by the reasons the conclusion is correct.

Cases and other authorities are not themselves reasons to accept a conclusion. Rather, they support an argument’s legal premises. Strong legal arguments combine propositions of law and fact to generate reasons.1 Put differently, a legal reason usually consists of a rule combined with a fact shown to fall within the rule.

Attorneys cite cases to defend their legal propositions (rule statements) and show that the facts at issue are governed by those rules. I discuss how to persuasively choose, cite, and quote cases and other legal authorities in chapter 8 of Elegant Legal Writing.

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Conclusions + reasons: A visual example

Here’s an example. In securities fraud cases, plaintiffs and prosecutors must prove scienter, a nebulous concept meaning that the defendant knew of the fraud and intended to deceive investors.2 A securities-fraud defendant might argue that because they invested in the same securities as the plaintiff, they had no incentive to lie or knowledge of any fraud.

The argument map below, created with the free software Argdown, shows how propositions of law and fact can be weaved together to form a reason for the defendant’s preferred legal conclusion (that the plaintiff cannot prove scienter). The argument consists of six propositions adding up to one legal conclusion, shown in the uppermost box of the image. The conclusion is supported by two premises, one a proposition of fact and one of law. These premises are themselves conclusions inferred from more elementary propositions of law and fact.

If the court accepts the defendant’s argument, the security fraud claim will fail because scienter is a required element. These are high stakes, making it essential for the attorney to communicate the argument clearly. This requires stating the premises, demonstrating their truth, and showing how they interact to lead to the conclusion.

Many attorneys fail to trace an argument’s logic in this way because they build their argument around a favorable case. For example, the attorney arguing the scienter point above might start the discussion with a paragraph like this:

In the Ninth Circuit case Worlds of Wonder Securities Litigation, a class of investors sued Worlds of Wonder, Inc. (“WOW”) for securities fraud in a case involving so-called “junk bonds.” See In re Worlds of Wonder Sec. Litig., 35 F.3d 1407, 1411 (9th Cir. 1994) (N.D. Cal. 1993). The investors argued that one of the company’s prospectuses was misleading. See id. at 1416.

Case-centric paragraphs like these may lead the judge to misunderstand your argument or fail to see its point. You may lose the judge’s interest and then the case.

Instead, start by stating your conclusion, then systematically provide the premises and inferences leading to the conclusion. Worlds of Wonder is indeed a great case for this defendant — so good that it might even warrant discussion in the brief’s body text rather than its footnotes. But its sole purpose is to support one of the propositions that interact to produce the desired conclusion (that the plaintiff can’t prove scienter).

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Make your argument’s structure transparent and easy to visualize. It may help to think about argument maps like the one shown above; suppose the judge told their clerk to map your brief’s arguments, which requires identifying each argument’s premises and showing how these interact to produce a conclusion. Your argument section should make that task easy.

Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024), which is available on Amazon and Audible. For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is now available for preorder.

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A proposition is a declarative statement that can be true or false. In law and other domains, arguments consist of one or more premises, one or more conclusions, and the reasoning used to connect the premises to the conclusions. Premises and conclusions are always propositions.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines the relevant sense of scienter as a “mental state consisting in an intent to deceive, manipulate, or defraud.” Bryan A. Garner (ed.), Black’s Law Dict. 1613 (11th ed.).

ELW updates: a new audiobook, LinkedIn tips, and more

Ryan McCarl — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 20:35:00 GMT

I have a few updates to share — but first, I must ask you a favor.

Please rate Elegant Legal Writing on Amazon.

If you enjoy my work, please take two minutes and give Elegant Legal Writing a five-star rating on Amazon. Writing a short review is even better, but just clicking the five stars to rate the book helps, too. Amazon reviews and word-of-mouth marketing (especially sharing the book and my posts with your networks) are the most important determiners of whether the book will continue its momentum and stay put alongside the books of Ross Guberman and Bryan Garner at the top of the genre.

I’ve been blown away by how well my book has been received since its publication last month. The early reviews have been glowing. Attorney Leah Tedford published a positive review of the book on Law.com, and I’ve received personal notes from lawyers, law professors, and others across the profession praising the book.

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Elegant Legal Writing is coming to Audible — and CD!

I’m excited to announce that Elegant Legal Writing is now available for preorder on Audible! As a lifelong fan of audiobooks, I’m so glad the University of California Press and Tantor Media decided to create an audio version of my book. The hardcover, paperback, and Kindle versions were released last month, and the audio versions will be released on April 16.

I learned yesterday that the audio version will be published not just on Audible, but also as an audio CD! That warms my nostalgic heart. Throughout my teens and 20s, I listened to books-on-CD (or NPR, or Oyez Supreme Court arguments) whenever I drove. Perhaps the seeds of Elegant Legal Writing were planted when I listened to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style at age 16; I’ll never forget the contemptuous way the narrator denounced the word “utilize” as an “abomination.”

Custom training webinars and workshops

One happy consequence of publishing Elegant Legal Writing has been that businesses and professors have been approaching me more often to ask about custom workshops, webinars, guest talks, and so on. I’ve even heard from a Fortune 100 company that wants to hire me to train their legal department.

Please email me if you’re interested in discussing webinars, guest appearances, or collaborations.

1000 follower thank-you

I started this blog in 2021, when I first started working on the Elegant Legal Writing manuscript after teaching an Advanced Legal Writing course at UCLA Law. Today, the newsletter has reached 1,000 followers. I’ve blogged since high school (2003!) and never approached such a milestone. Thank you for supporting and sharing my work. The more engagement I get, the more I’m encouraged to carve out time to write new material.

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Legal writing tips on LinkedIn.

As easy as Substack makes blogging, it still takes longer to write a post for this newsletter than to dash off a quick LinkedIn writing tip. I’ve also been gradually building a network of attorneys who weigh in on my posts or share their own great legal-writing content, which I comment on — leading to enlightening exchanges on my posts and theirs. If you’re a LinkedIn user, consider following my account or sending me a connection request since I’ve been posting new tips there a few times per week.

Here are a few of my recent LinkedIn posts that haven’t appeared on this blog:

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Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and forthcoming on Audible.

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Quick writing fixes: sentence logic, compound adjectives, hidden redundancy, and action verbs

Ryan McCarl — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 18:25:08 GMT

Here’s a point heading I recently revised in a draft litigation filing. My revision illustrates four techniques recommended in Elegant Legal Writing:

Check your sentences’ logic.
Simplify and hyphenate compound adjectives.
Tighten your sentences by rooting out hidden redundancy.
Use action verbs.

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First, the original heading:

The Court should review this petition because there is a split of authority in the appellate districts about the payment or performance factors requirement.

That heading appeared in an early draft of a petition for review asking the Supreme Court of California to grant discretionary review of a decision by a lower court (the Fifth District Court of Appeal). The legal issue involved the collateral-order doctrine, which allows some orders in a lawsuit to be appealed even if the lawsuit remains ongoing.

As background, California’s intermediate appellate courts are divided into “Districts,” which are analogous to the “Circuits” in federal appellate courts.

Check your sentences’ logic.

Check each sentence’s logic. A petition for review doesn’t ask the court to “review this petition”; every submitted petition will be reviewed. That’s what the court does when it reads the petition and decides whether to grant the requested relief. Instead, a petition for review asks the court to grant the petition, allowing the petitioner to argue that the lower court’s decision should be overturned.

Here’s the heading after implementing this first revision:

The Court should grant this petition because there is a split of authority in the appellate districts about the payment or performance factors requirement.

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Simplify and hyphenate compound adjectives.

Second, simplify and hyphenate compound adjectives. Compound adjectives (sometimes called phrasal adjectives) are groups of words that work together to modify the following noun phrase.1 Hyphenating these helps the reader parse the sentence more easily by clarifying how words should be grouped.

In the example above, “the payment or performance factors requirement” can be revised to “the payment-or-performance requirement.” Here’s the heading after implementing the first two revisions:

The Court should grant this petition because there is a split of authority in the appellate districts about the payment-or-performance requirement.

Note that Grammarly wrongly flags “payment-or-performance” as an error, showing that revision software is imperfect; you should consider its suggestions but use your judgment to decide which to accept.

Tighten your sentences by rooting out hidden redundancy.

The heading can be made more concise by removing the phrase “The Court should grant this petition,” as that contention is supplied by context and inherent in the filing. After all, the purpose of a petition for review is to ask a court to grant the petition. Here’s the next version of the heading:

There is a split of authority in the appellate districts about the payment-or-performance requirement.

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Use action verbs.

Finally, here’s an even better version of the heading. This final version replaces the static verb is with the action verb disagree, making the heading more lively and following Joseph Williams’ advice to write about “characters performing actions” (see ELW § 4.4):

The appellate districts disagree about whether the collateral-order doctrine includes a payment-or-performance requirement.

Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon.

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A phrase consists of one or more words that operate as a unit, but unlike a clause, a phrase lacks a subject, verb, or both. Example noun phrases include “lawyer,” “law firm,” and “court of appeals”; example verb phrases include “run” and “went running.”

Align legal arguments with the motion’s procedural posture.

Ryan McCarl — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 22:15:36 GMT

This post is excerpted from Ryan McCarl’s book Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024).

Most litigation motions are made by invoking a procedural rule that allows litigants to file that type of motion. Different motions have different procedural rules that constrain what facts judges may consider and what law they must apply. These procedural rules should be central to attorneys’ decisions about how to write briefs supporting or opposing the motion.

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Briefs that seem unaware of procedural constraints—for example, motions to dismiss that introduce facts from sources other than allegations in the plaintiff’s complaint—put you at risk of losing the court’s trust.

Procedural context also affects which authorities you should cite to support or oppose a motion. It is more effective to cite cases that were decided in a similar procedural posture or one even less favorable to your side. For example, if you represent a plaintiff and need cases to cite in opposing a defendant’s motion to dismiss, look for cases where an appellate court reversed a trial court’s dismissal order. If you deviate from this rule and rely on cases involving different procedural standards, alert the judge if there is any risk that they might feel misled. Here’s an example of how to do so in a case parenthetical:

Aeroflot ignores James’ citation to the Seventh Circuit case Sompo Japan Ins., Inc. v. Nippon Cargo Airlines Co., which does not relate to removal or subject-matter jurisdiction. See 522 F.3d 776, 786-87 (7th Cir. 2008) (holding, in an appeal following a bench trial, that a plaintiff could pursue a setoff claim under Illinois law).

Try to choose favorable battlegrounds for your arguments so that the procedural rules favor you rather than your opponent. That might mean, for example, deferring a challenge to the opposition’s claims until trial instead of trying to hit an early home run through a motion for summary judgment. At trial, the plaintiff will have the burden of producing evidence for their claims and proving each of those claims’ elements without the benefit of favorable procedural rules.

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Here’s another good example, a legal standard section that uses its space effectively to show that the court has little choice but to grant the motion:

II. Legal standard for Anti-SLAPP fee motions
A party that successfully moves to strike claims under California’s Anti-SLAPP statute is entitled to recover their costs and attorney’s fees, including the fees incurred in preparing both the motion to strike and a later motion seeking to enforce the statutory fee provision.
Statutory fee provisions are designed “to provide financial incentives necessary for the private enforcement of important civil rights.” The Anti-SLAPP statute’s fee provision is broadly construed to carry out the legislative purpose of reimbursing a party for expenses incurred in extracting themselves from a baseless lawsuit. [citations omitted]

As with any argument device, emphasizing a favorable standard can be overdone. For example, I have seen plaintiffs’ attorneys file briefs opposing motions to dismiss in which most of the brief elaborated on the procedural standard. Such overlong procedural standard sections conclusorily imply—not by analyzing the complaint’s allegations, but by accumulating pro-defendant quotations from judicial opinions denying motions to dismiss—that because the standard is difficult to meet, the defendant has not met it in the current case, so the motion must be denied.

Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and the author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon.

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Beyond IRAC and CREAC: Alternative Models of Legal Reasoning

Ryan McCarl — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 20:39:03 GMT

I’m giving a presentation today at the 22nd Annual Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference hosted by LMU Loyola Law School. Attendees and anyone else who is curious can download a PDF of my slides below.

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Mccarl, Beyond Irac And Creac Alternative Models Of Legal Reasoning

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Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and the author of Elegant Legal Writing (U. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is now available on Amazon.

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Don’t disparage opponents in your litigation filings.

Ryan McCarl — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:05:08 GMT

Refrain from personal attacks against the opposing party or counsel. Such attacks have no persuasive value and may even elicit sympathy for the opponent. When possible, avoid mentioning opposing counsel entirely and simply discuss the law and facts.

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Consider this poor example from a brief:

Indeed, Plaintiff’s modus operandi in this case has been to engage in rhetoric that is nothing more than a consistent effort to bully and intimidate the defense through never-ending, frivolous threats of sanctions.
Because of the procedural defects and substantive misrepresentations in this motion, Defendants can only conclude that Plaintiff, as is his course of practice, brings this motion in bad faith for the purpose of causing the parties, and this Court, to waste its resources and efforts defending against yet another senseless motion.

Such diatribes aren’t just unprofessional; they are also unpersuasive. Removing them helps ensure that every sentence in your legal brief aims to inform or persuade the judge (your target reader).

Legal briefs aren’t the place to vent or argue about trivialities. Whenever you’re tempted to respond in kind to an opposing attorney’s personal barbs, remember that litigation is about the parties and their claims, not the attorneys and their egos.

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For advice on more productive ways to advance your client’s arguments and rebut those of an opponent, see my book Elegant Legal Writing and my recent post on how to write great reply briefs.

Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (U. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is now available on Amazon.

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