What is Good Legal Writing and What Separates It From Bad Legal Writing
[00:00:00] The next question is what is good legal writing? What separates it from bad legal writing?
Good legal writing is understandable, it's short but it's understandable by all audiences.
The worst attorneys will typically use the biggest words and the longest sentences and things will be the least understandable. The best attorneys would be the most direct. So the legal writing does that. It also captures and doesn't miss issues.
You have to understand all the issues. One of the fun things, a very good legal writer, a little bit long-winded Posner, for example, in his Ninth Circuit or he used to be, I don't know if he still has, but his writing has always been very fun to read because he would write these long opinions and the opinions would go on for pages and pages.
They were very understandable and entertaining. He would conclude, you would get one or two, short paragraphs away from the conclusion, and all of a sudden you would think it was going to go one way and would turn in everything on his head by the last moment, introducing a piece of information that no one that was part of the conclusion, but no one had thought of, or it wasn't didn't look like it was going to go one way and the opinion would go the exact opposite.
He does that a lot with a lot of opinions and it's fun, so it's that [00:01:00] to good legal writing, doesn't miss issues. I would just make sure if you're writing something that people understand, what you're talking about, then you're not missing next.
Bad legal writing. I would say just as a matter, is usually the big words mean it doesn't need to, is longer than it needs to.
A lot of times, people will have subject headings and the subject headings might have an argument, or instead of argument, you're better off writing what the argument is.
Do not blah, blah, blah, because of such and such. So a lot of times people use arguments, in all these different subject headings, basically describe what's there, your subject headings should be descriptive. So many things about good legal writing compared to average legal writing. But, one of the things I would say is if you're doing this for a living and you are if you're in the legal profession. You should always be doing whatever you can. Learn to read books about things and to be very careful about constantly be improving your writing.
It's important, especially if you do it for a living. A lot of times, you can learn things very quickly without having to stop making mistakes over and over.
