If you want to practice techniques for making your briefs more concise, clear, and readable, I hope you’ll join me for an online writing workshop.
I’m planning a series of small-group, intensive online workshops for lawyers and other legal professionals. The 90-minute sessions will be participatory, with attendance limited to 20 participants to allow real-time feedback.
The first workshop, on concision and plain language, will be offered twice at an introductory rate of $95 per session. Choose either session:
Dates: Thursday, August 27, and Thursday, September 3, 2026, noon–1:30 p.m. Pacific (3:00–4:30 p.m. Eastern)
Format and duration: 90 minutes, live on Zoom; not recorded
Introductory rate and session size: $95 per session; limited to 20 participants
Legal writers should convey ideas straightforwardly, use as few words as possible without sacrificing precision, and eliminate unnecessary jargon and legalese. The law is complex enough; our prose must not add complexity.
Workshop exercises based on Elegant Legal Writing will help you:
Write reader-friendly sentences
Cut information readers don’t need
Delete and condense bloated phrases
Eliminate redundancies and unnecessary modifiers
Replace legalese with ordinary language
After the workshop, participants will receive a reference handout summarizing key techniques. (No CLE credit is provided.)
About Ryan McCarl
Ryan McCarl is the author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024) and a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP. He has taught advanced legal writing at two law schools and delivered legal-writing presentations to judges, government lawyers, bar associations, and law firms.