Sure, typography is important because presentation is important. But the substance of your argument and the quality of your writing is still the most important of all. Bad typography can undercut good legal writing, but good typography won’t rescue bad legal writing.
I thought I was a good writer, but then I discovered these books and realized how much room I had to improve.
Admittedly, all these books are written by Bryan Garner. What can I say, I’m a fan. You are already familiar with Garner’s work if you own the ubiquitous Black’s Law Dictionary—he’s the editor. But his books on English usage and legal writing are also exceptional.
Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner. A short, easily digested book intertwining Garner’s writing tips with practical advice about advocacy from Antonin Scalia. (Even if you don’t like Scalia on the bench, he is probably the best writer on the Supreme Court, and is very pithy and pragmatic here.)
The Elements of Legal Style, Bryan Garner. Another short book that (as the title implies) is Garner’s version of Strunk & White, but aimed at lawyers and legal writing.
The Winning Brief, Bryan Garner. This book shifts the focus from style to substance. Garner walks through his tips for generating concise, persuasive prose, and features many helpful before-and-after examples.
Garner’s Modern American Usage and A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, Bryan Garner. Most writers have a dictionary; some have a thesaurus; but very few have a usage guide (or even know what it is). A usage guide is like a dictionary, but instead of describing the meanings of words, it tells you how to properly use them (and how to avoid abusing them). To that end, it covers words, phrases, commonly mixed-up pairs of words (e.g. inapt vs. unapt), and general grammatical topics (like punctuation, sentence length, and controversies like whether it’s acceptable to use “they” as a third-person singular pronoun.)
These two are big books that contain a huge amount of research, thoughtfully presented. GMAU is the general-purpose volume; ADMLU focuses on legal terms. But both volumes are indispensable reference works for any lawyer. I’m not ashamed to admit that I read GMAU cover-to-cover.
Buy these books—they will help you win cases.
What an inspirational website. It has not only opened my eyes to the importance of typography in my documents, but now it has introduced me to the work of a writer of whom I was previously ignorant but whose books and essays I expect to find enormously entertaining. Thanks, on both counts.
You know how sometimes you’ll mentally read ahead in a sentence and anticipate the next few words?
I hit that last em-dash and was secretly hoping to see “…they will help you win friends and influence people.”
You can’t win cases without influencing people. So it all comes around.
I think Micah was referring to Gerry Spence.
I think a worthy addition to this list is Kenneth Adams’ “A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting.” It’s an excellent guide for lawyers looking to improve the precision and clarity of their transactional draftsmanship.
Adams does recommend using the Calibri font, and for good reason (OS fonts are better for exchanging drafts with others) but otherwise I think his guide is in accord with the presentation ideas here.
I’m a freelance graphic designer, and therefore I have a contract with which I’ve had lawyerly help. It seems that “lawyering up” a contract involves replacing generally-understandable language with lots of “hereby”s and “shall”s “notwithstanding”s and so on. Why “in the event of” instead of just “if”? Why must sentences have six clauses?
So I *adore* this site. I want to hand my clients beautifully designed legal contracts. But I don’t want my first deliverable to be so coarse and distancing. Is there hope?
There’s no reason why lawyer-drafted contracts have to be impenetrably dense. Ken Adams (http://www.adamsdrafting.com) is one of the best resources on this topic.
Your lawyer works for you. Tell him you want your contract written in simpler language because it’s a business requirement. When I worked in the technology industry, I told my lawyer I needed a nondisclosure agreement that would fit on a business card, so I could carry it in my wallet. He did it. I used it.
Modern law schools emphasize a plain-English approach to legal writing. So I thought that legalese was a generational disease that would be eradicated like smallpox. But I’ve met plenty of younger lawyers who have been infected.
I now consider the true disease to be the overreliance on boilerplate text. Lawyers, for reasons of risk aversion, lack of time, or lack of interest, often prefer to use text that someone used before, rather than write their own language from scratch.
Not to say that there aren’t good reasons to do that. If you’re unfamiliar with a particular kind of agreement, boilerplate text can show you how it’s usually done. Why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to?
But boilerplate, whatever its source, needs to be read critically and adapted carefully. And many lawyers skip this step. Lawyers should use boilerplate as a map, but more often use it as a crutch.
Recently, I worked on a case where opposing counsel asked me to put together a draft settlement agreement. OK, sure. My draft included the provision:
Opposing counsel amended this to read:
When I asked opposing counsel whether all those extra words were necessary, he conceded that the substance was basically the same, but he preferred his version because it was “standard boilerplate language”.
That brings me to one other problem with boilerplate text: the mere fact that it’s boilerplate is usually offered as proof of its authority. As if we should put our trust in the All-Benevolent Gods of Boilerplate. These mysterious gods have about the same editorial credibility as Wikipedia authors. Like Wikipedia, boilerplate can be a useful place to start, but it’s not where you should stop.
Brian Garner is excellent. Haven’t read Elements, but I second your comments on the rest. Indispensable all.
For what it’s worth, I’m one year out of law school and I do my best to write documents that read easy as a magazine. But I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle against the boilerplate crowd. I lost hours worth of work on a set of pithy-but-dense and deadly-precise discovery instructions when a senior associate pasted over them a full-page-long definition of the word Document. It included, fyi: the memo, the inter-office memo, the intra-office memo, and, of course, the desk calendar.
Anyway, that’s all to say, keep up the good work. I love what you’re doing and I hope it makes a dent.
As a first-year associate it’s difficult to influence cultural habits. Keep your expectations modest. But good work is often noticed even if it doesn’t make it into the final product. Put good writing and typography habits to work where you can. Eventually, others will catch on.
In the meantime, if you object to having large quantities of your professional output wasted, you may want to reconsider civil litigation as a career. To paraphrase the old adage about advertising, I figure that at least half the hours I spend on any case will end up being irrelevant to the outcome; I just don’t know which half it will be.