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Fixing poorly written opinions 

By: Mark Painter
Published: September 2, 2010

Tags: legal writing

Columnist Mark Painter offers some suggestions on how poorly written legal opinions could be improved.

Superstitions, fetishes and myths in legal writing 

By: Mark Painter
Published: February 16, 2010

Tags: legal writing

Have you ever been told not to (1) start a sentence with and or but [we discussed this in detail a previous column], (2) end a sentence with a preposition, or (3) have a paragraph with fewer than three sentences?

The Legal Writer: Government legalese

By: Mark Painter
Published: October 19, 2009

Tags: legal writing

Columnist Mark Painter’s latest column looks at the problem of government legalese.

The Legal Writer: Jumbles of letters and numbers 

By: Mark Painter
Published: June 29, 2009

Tags: legal writing

Lawyers and judges long ago forfeited much readability by including cites in the body of the text, rather than in footnotes. Judge Mark Painter explains how cluttering up your document with jumbles of letters and numbers makes it unreadable, for both lawyers and laypeople alike.

Column: Words and numbers 

By: Mark Painter
Published: May 15, 2009

Tags: legal writing

Lawyerisms abound. One of the worst is the parenthetical numerical. We clutter our documents with redundant numbers.

Fixing questionable writing

By: Mark Painter
Published: March 10, 2008

Tags: legal writing

We often run across confusing writing. And it’s not only legal writing – there is plenty of mediocre writing out there. Recently I saw two sentences in a local “newspaper” that cried out for improvement.

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