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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.

Top tips on how to improve your legal writing 

By: Aaron Krivitzky
Published: July 22, 2009

Tags: legal writing

Legal documents can be difficult to read.

It is not uncommon for dangling participles, incomplete clauses, passive voice, split verb phrases, misspelled words and/or poor grammar to appear in a contract, brief or court opinion.

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.

The Legal Writer: Two easy fixes

By: Justin Rebello
Published: March 19, 2009

Tags: legal writing

Mark Painter’s latest legal writing column suggests two easy ways to immediately improve your writing.

Is legal Latin rigor mortis?

By: Sylvia Hsieh
Published: January 19, 2009

Tags: 20 things, Latin, legal writing

The use of legal Latin is dying in the courtroom as speaking and writing in “plain English” gains steam in the legal profession.

Some legal scholars applaud the trend.

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.

The county is taking soil samples needed in order for it to finish its
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The ‘write’ stuff

By: Dick Dahl
Published: December 4, 2006

Tags: Judges, legal briefs, legal writing

There’s little mystery about what appellate judges look for in the briefs they get from lawyers.

The mystery, at least to Suzanne Elliott, a criminal defense attorney in Seattle, is why so many lawyers fail to heed those judicial signals – especially when appellate briefs carry more weight than trial briefs.

Write to the point

By: Nora Tooher
Published: May 22, 2006

Tags: legal writing, training, writing

Like many first-year associates, Matt Berkowitz found it difficult to transition from law school writing to the clear, concise and compelling writing his firm’s partners demand.

To help Berkowitz and other first-year associates improve their writing skills, his firm – Kenyon & Kenyon in New York – provides a yearly writing and editing workshop for its new lawyers.