Legal Writing: Who’s Your Audience? What’s Your Goal?
Legal writing is a highly specialized art form that should be employed only when it can’t be avoided. Every audience will appreciate your adherence to a simple plan: never use highly technical writing techniques when more reader friendly versions will do the job (and be more effective in the process).
This is a good rule for all technical professionals. Doctors, pharmacists, engineers, marketers, human relations experts, and rocket scientists.
I’m not simply referring to the Plain English vs. Legalese argument here. This argument has raged for decades now and each side has its merits. Both are right.
What I’m suggesting is that even in situations where either legalese or “Plain English” might arguably be better, a more reader friendly writing style is the best choice if the goal is to reach your audience.
We lawyers spend decades perfecting the art of legal writing. We know how important the precise words used in the precise order are. When our audience is trained to read and understand both content and context, the more precise our writing, the better. Statutes, tax returns, wills, real estate documents, regulations, and the like must be exactly stated and legally correct. Much has been written about whether this goal is more effectively achieved by legalese or Plain English. Suffice it to say that both sides have fans.
Almost everything else lawyers write should not be as formulaic, dull, and boring as even the very best Plain English version of any such document. Why? Simply because no one save the very highly motivated will read or understand what’s been written as well as when more readable style is employed.
Even Supreme Court Justices with large staffs appreciate readable (even enjoyable) briefs. Overworked jurists in all lower courts, busy lawyers, members of the press who must digest court files and report accurately, clients, and everyone else in the world simply will not expend the energy to decipher the code contained in the average court paper, let alone articles intended for public consumption. When we’re writing to communicate, rather than writing to perfect a legal position, simple is better.
This is the rule I’m advocating: When in doubt, leave it out. (And always doubt.)
Leave out complicated words, convoluted sentence construction, long and winding arguments, secondary meanings of words. The shorter, pithier and more emotionally saturated the language is, the more likely it will reach a broad audience.
Yes, Content is King. Yes, Law is Complex. Yes, Law is Formal for good reason.
But reader comprehension of anything written by lawyers shouldn’t be more torture than a triple root canal without anesthetic. We don’t need a citation for that, do we?
