Every lawyer, law student and someone working in the legal area needs to be proficient in legal writing. But compared to other writing genres, legal writing is rather distinct. This is so because it requires much more than just a thorough knowledge of the law. And if you’re interested in learning what skills a great legal writer must possess, this blog post is for you.
One of the most important professional qualities a lawyer can possess is the ability to communicate clearly in writing. Writing that is thick, poorly organized, and riddled with grammar mistakes. And lacking cohesiveness is rarely persuasive or informative. In the worst-case scenario, it may alienate and perplex the reader and possibly damage the lawyer’s reputation.
It’s a good thing that lawyers may constantly hone and improve their ability to write persuasively. How can you then prepare to write a piece that will both enlighten and persuade your audience? To improve your legal writing abilities, read the following tips.
Table of Contents
Legal writing: What Is It?
The phrase “legal writing” refers to a style of writing employed in law, as the name suggests. Therefore, any written explanation of legal theories and analyses will be considered to be of this nature. But why is legal writing necessary?
To convey legal data to lawyers, clients, judges, and others, legitimate writing is fundamental. That’s since everyone incorporates a different perspective, indeed though those who work in the legitimate field can get a handle on it. And you wish more than fair legal ability to express your perspective to others. Hence, legal writing will be valuable in this situation.
This kind of composing can take numerous diverse shapes. These are a couple of of the forms:
- Briefs
- Agreements.
- Legal publications
- Opinions and arguments
Tips to Improve Your Legal Writing
You will be much better prepared to comprehend the recommendations to improve legal writing. Once you have learned the basics of lawful writing.
Understand your audience
In legal writing, as in other types of writing, it’s basic to recognize your target audience. As a result, the primary tip in this book emphasizes the requirement of decoding. And comprehending your audience before starting to make your lawful documents.
The reader of lawful writing may be your client, the restricting lawyer, the court’s judge, or a partner at your company. Your target advertisement may occasionally be a blend of the four. So it’s imperative to choose who your target audience is before you begin writing your legal report. But there are a couple of things you wish to know about who reads legitimate documents.
It’s vital to keep in mind that the judge can have access to all data relating to the case and possibly indeed outside of it. Consider the situation where you type in a client a private letter, but the client later sues you for negligence. That letter would then terminate to be a secret archive.
This is due to the reality that your client’s letter, which is included in a show, clarifies why you were a subpar lawyer. So, sometime recently starting to make your paper, you must be mindful of data like this concerning the expected audience for lawful writing.
Outline to remain organized
It’s like building a house without a floor and arranging to compose a lengthy book without an outline. You may get anything in the end. You could get anything in the end! Outlining before you begin writing will help you organize your ideas into a logical format. You’ll have the ability to arrange your ideas and points of contention while also defining your writing’s purpose.
You will frequently adhere to the format of an introduction, a factual foundation, an argument, and a conclusion. However, what if you’re answering something that your adversary has already written? In general, adopting the same structure is simpler. Respond to the arguments in the same sequence that they were stated, in other words.
Additionally, always include a table of contents at the start of any lengthy legal briefs or court filings (if the rules of the court allow it). The reader can navigate the document more easily and move back and forth without getting lost by using the table of contents as a road map.
Utilize headers and subheadings
Never undervalue the significance of headings and subheadings that are clear and simple. These essentially act as a roadmap for your readers while they read your document. What are some suggestions for how to make your headings and subheadings better?
The topic or issue should be stated in the section headings and subheadings, along with the lawyer’s position on it. The reader will find it simpler to understand your point if you do this. Use sentence case and bold for headings. It is challenging to read headings with all capital characters or with capital letters for each word.
Keep in mind that you want to eliminate as much guessing as you can from your reader’s ability to follow your text. This can be accomplished by including distinct headings and structuring them for easy reading.
Become more concise
Another crucial element demanded in most writing pieces, similar to the employment of active and passive voices, is outlining the complete event succinctly and directly. Among those pieces is legal writing. You’ll do better if you can express yourself in writing more succinctly and with fewer words. And the more effectively you can communicate the facts to the judge or the client, the better your writing will be. The fourth and final piece of advice in this manual is to practice being succinct in legal writing.
Writing succinctly and directly to the point takes a lot of skill, particularly in legal writing. You don’t know what legal terminology or expressions you need to employ to make a point, which is why. For this reason, both law students and writers frequently see it as one of the most difficult tasks to complete. To use six words as opposed to twelve, you will need to practice longer. Additionally, you will enjoy a considerably greater favour at work once you have mastered that skill.
Write in the form of complete sentences
To compose whole sentences is the fifth piece of advice in this manual. You could assume that this advice is obvious and that it belongs at the top of the list. It should. However, we’ve included it as the fifth piece of advice in this article because going over the other four was crucial before this one.
A sentence that isn’t complete is never acceptable. Writing unfinished sentences is just plain lazy or inept writing. Therefore, you should put crafting whole phrases first.
However, let’s say that during proofreading you found a statement that was purposefully incomplete since it missed some details. In this case, you can reword the sentence using AI rephrasing tools because they will offer alternative ways to finish the sentence. Additionally, you can finish the initial words using the offered variants.
You can use a text summarizer to summarize important passages in a text and to create summaries of legal papers. Legal practitioners who need to swiftly review a lot of information may find this to be especially helpful. To create reports and analyses on legal subjects, use the summary generator.
Always do proofreading
Spelling errors may unquestionably damage a piece of writing. And there is no exception to this rule in legal writing. As a result, this guide’s eighth recommendation highlights the importance of utilizing proper spelling in legal writing.
It’s crucial to spell your client’s name, the judge’s name, and even the name of the opposing attorney accurately in addition to basic English phrases. Because most of us have lousy recollections, you must always check the spelling of your audience’s names. And the easiest way to do that is to make use of official documents.
Let’s imagine that you are drafting a client letter. If so, you should check your client’s spelling by referring to some sort of identification, the contract you have with them, or the legal services agreement. Similar to this, you should also verify their spelling if you are writing a legal document to the judge. You can consult the court’s official website for further information about it. By doing this, you can make sure that the names of your audience are spelt correctly.
These are some methods for ensuring that the names of your audience are spelt correctly. However, you can use a grammar checker’s help if you wish to verify the spelling of common English terms.
Make time to write daily
You’ll probably have one, if not several, writing assignments looming over your head whether you’re taking classes during the semester or working at a summer clerkship. Try to set aside some time every day to work on your writing because effective legal writing requires effort and practice.
You might do a lot of writing on some days and just complete a sentence or two on other days, but if you continuously work on your writing, it will eventually show in the work you produce.
6 Best OCR Tools to Digitize Your Legal Documents
Conclusion
Improving your legal writing skills could seem difficult at first. But if you follow the right instructions, you can overcome this difficult chore. You won’t need anything else but the aforementioned advice if you want to draft legal documents more effectively. So put them to use to sharpen your legal writing abilities.
However, you will only benefit from the advice provided in the thorough guide above if you put it into practice regularly. Because if you don’t exercise your legal writing abilities. No matter how much writing advice you study, you’ll never improve.