Write with your audience in mind.
Keep your reader engaged by avoiding these common audience-related legal writing mistakes.
The post below is partially excerpted from Ryan McCarl’s book Elegant Legal Writing, which was published this month by the University of California Press and has received rave reviews from attorneys, law professors, and law students.
Legal writing aims to teach and persuade, not to gratify the writer’s ego or need for self-expression. When you revise, ensure every sentence, detail, and citation provides information the reader will find helpful or persuasive.
Writing with your target audience in mind can help you avoid some bad habits that abound in legal writing.
Avoid research dumps.
If you’re writing a brief or memo, don’t do a “research dump” in which you fill the text with chains of citations or tangential asides. Don’t try to find a home in the text for everything you learned during your research.
Judges, colleagues, and clients want you to clear a path through the thicket of the law, not reproduce that thicket in your document. The point of a legal document is never to show how hard you’ve worked to solve a problem. Instead, the point is the conclusion you’ve reached and the reasons supporting the conclusion.
A related tip for law students is to avoid “outline dumps” on law exams. Don’t try to cram as much of your outline as possible into an answer to show how much you’ve learned. Professors evaluate your legal analysis and judgment, not your skills as a notetaker.
Don’t snipe at opponents.
Lawyers often pepper their filings with snarky asides and snipes at the opposing party or its lawyers. Avoid this practice. A judge reading your brief would like to know why they should grant or deny the relief requested. Judges are not interested in petty grievances between opposing counsel.
Avoid unnecessary legal history lessons.
Most legal audiences are eager for you to get to the point, so they are rarely interested in how a doctrine became the law. Just say what the law is, not how it came to be — unless your opponent relies on outdated law or you have one of the unusual cases in which a court needs to understand a doctrine’s history to decide the case properly.
Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP, author of Elegant Legal Writing (U. Cal. Press 2024), and adjunct professor at Loyola Law School. For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is now available on Amazon at bit.ly/elw-book.
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