Creativity Can Help You Write What Your Client Needs
| Publication year | 2018 |
| Pages | 0075 |
| Citation | Vol. 23 No. 7 Pg. 0075 |
Writing Matters
Creativity Can Help You Write What Your Client Needs
This installment of Writing Matters reminds you that creativity is a key attribute of a successful legal writer and shares five tips to help rekindle your creative legal writing fire.
BY KAREN J. SNEDDON AND DAVID HRICIK
Most lawyers solve problems. Excelling at solving problems requires many forms of creativity, including defining, analyzing and determining the steps needed to solve each one. Over time, of course, virtually all lawyers specialize, and so each problem begins to look more like the last, making it more difficult to see beyond the tried-and-true, to look for creative alternatives to what worked the last time, and the time before that, too.
Legal writing may be more vulnerable to calcification than the other skills needed to solve problems. Creativity can be crushed further with the crunch of time constraints—caused by deadlines and the need to keep legal fees low—and the weight of conventions. All three of these exert tremendous pressure on a legal writer.
This makes it hard for legal writing to remain what it must be—an inherently creative process. Whether it is the first will or the 500th, legal documents begin as a blank screen or piece of paper. Onto that blank page words are shaped into sentences. Sentences are woven into paragraphs. Paragraphs are crafted into pages.
This installment of Writing Matters reminds you that creativity is a key attribute of a successful legal writer and shares five tips to help rekindle your creative legal writing fire.
1 Structure Your Writing for This Audience, Not Your Last One
Legal writing always has a purpose. That purpose usually involves the reader relying upon the text to do or refrain from doing something. The purpose may be to inform the reader about potential causes of action to decide whether to file a suit. The purpose may be to persuade a court to grant or deny a motion.
Both organization and content are informed by the purpose. A creative legal writer will recognize that a structure—both large and small—that fits the needs of one audience will fail miserably if used for another.
The typical office memorandum provides a simple example. The structure of the sections in a typical office memorandum are as follows: heading, question presented, brief answer, statement of the...
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