Legal Writing

"One of the only": the ambiguous phrase that keeps popping up. I don't know what this means — and neither do your readers. A recent newspaper story about Martha Stewart’s sale of her brand quoted a branding maven: “When [Stewart] started, she ...

When lawyers and law firms get focused on “creating content” (for those of you living in caves, that's what "writing" is now called), they think mostly about the subject matter. And that makes a lot of sense, for obvious reasons. But often ...

Even the best writer can sometimes confuse words that sound almost the same — call them sound-alikes. A prior post reviewed many of the ...

Maybe you’ve read the stories about the candidate who wasn’t hired because of spelling errors in the resumé. Or the firm that lost the bid in response to a request for proposal because of grammatical errors on its website. It’s not just lawyers ...

Ethics rules require you to keep your client informed (see ABA Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4). The client’s guidelines may require interval and event reporting. But sometimes it feels like nobody on the other end is reading your client status ...

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that ...

Lawyers, it turns out, are not so special. They have just as much difficulty writing and speaking well in their native tongue as the next person. Poor grammar. Jargon. Weird syntax. The ever-popular use of 10 words when one will do. You have ...