Posts tagged as:

legal writing

Please stop capitalizing every other word

September 25, 2008

Lawyers have a terrible habit of Overusing Capitalization. This goes for pleadings, discovery requests, briefs, you name it. Exuberant capitalization is the “cop talk” of legal writing.
For those prone to over-capitalization, the Evanston Township, Illinois, high school has a great primer on capitalization. Litigators capitalize some other words, like Plaintiff and Defendant, by convention, but [...]

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Bryan Garner interviews the U.S. Supreme Court justices

March 4, 2008

For the word nerds, here are interviews of eight of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices (Roberts, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito), taken between 2006 and 2007 by Bryan Garner, the legal writing geek. I have not had a chance to sit through all of them, yet, but I plan to set [...]

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Blogroll: Lawyers['] Writing Wrongs

February 27, 2008

Lawyers['] Writing Wrongs is a relatively new blog that exposes humorously-bad legal writing. Author “Legal Literatus” lists the following subtitles:

Your briefs are shitty.
You get paid $200/hour for this?
Displeasing the Court with Shitty Writing.
Counsellor, why?
Sometimes pro se is better.

I think the “pinata brief” is the best example of the brand of humor provided by Lawyers['] Writing [...]

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Don’t use Helvetica for absolutely everything

January 28, 2008

This. For the love of God. So says Robin Wicker, a graduate of University College Falmouth, in a flickr pool for graduates to pass on their wisdom to incoming students. And so says me.
Attorneys should know by now that Helvetica (or Microsoft’s bastard spinoff, Arial) is a terrible, terrible font choice for use in legal [...]

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Style tips for HTML

May 29, 2007

A List Apart has a great article on using special characters in HTML. According to the article, decimal codes are the way to go, and you shouldn’t trust FrontPage and Dreamweaver to insert the correct character codes for viewing across browsers.
The article also goes into an illustration–well worth reading–on the differences between hyphens, em dashes, [...]

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