Reclaiming Our Humanity: Make Your Legal Writing More Readable. Most attorneys write like they think an attorney is supposed to sound.

• Author: Jake Brainard
• Pages: 15-18

Appellate Practice

American Bar Association Litigation Section

Fall 2021, Vol. 41 No. 1

© 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

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August 28, 2018

Reclaiming Our Humanity: Make Your Legal

Writing More Readable

Most attorneys write like they think an attorney is supposed

to sound.

By Jake Brainard

We have all seen it. Opposing counsel serves a brief. You struggle to trudge through the

legalese and long citations. You find unnecessary Latin phrases, words like heretofore, and

string citations with several explanatory phrases scattered throughout them. On top of all

of it, the brief is 70 pages when 30 would have sufficed. You spend time cutting through the

awkward and antiquated prose to make notes for a response. Then you draft your

response—only to fall into the same trap.

Ask just about any judge, and she will tell you that making your briefs readable is vital to

making the biggest impact. So why do we, as attorneys, get stuck running on the same legal

writing wheel? Because most attorneys write like they think an attorney is supposed to

sound. It is easy to forget that, after all of the point-counterpoint and the seemingly well-

placed a fortiori, the point of writing the brief is so that it is read and is persuasive.

Somewhere in law school and the first years of practice, we lose that piece of our human

understanding that helps us speak as regular people do. I say it is time lawyers reclaimed

that understanding.

“How do we go back to writing like human beings?” you might ask. Simple changes make

significant differences.

Legalese

Use clear language instead of the dreaded legalese. A brief is a story and then an argument

to support your “happily ever after” ending.

Consider the following statement in a fact section:

Counsel for Plaintiff sent a letter to Defendant dated May 4, 2016, as the

requisite prelitigation notice concerning the ongoing dispute vis-à-vis certain