Be honest: have you ever deemed anything? Me either.
The quickest way to improve your legal writing is to eliminate legalese, jargon, and bloat. I wrote about the need to eliminate shall from your writing, and created a bit of a kerfuffle by doing so—some lawyers seem to have an almost romantic attachment to it.
I also urged you to stop using such to mean this, that, these, those, or the.
Now, let’s deal with deem. Let’s deal with it by putting it out of our misery.
We spend a fair amount of time here discussing legal writing. It’s not emphasized nearly enough in law school, and as a result, poor legal writing is everywhere, creating confusion, wasting time, and losing cases.
The simplest way to improve your legal writing is to stop using legalese. Yes, legal writing sometimes requires terms of art. But far too many lawyers misuse common words, thinking they have some legal meaning when they do not, and wind up only confusing and annoying readers, including other lawyers, judges, and juries.
Such is just such a word.
Are good legal writers born with writing ability, or does a lawyer become a good legal writer through mentoring, dedication to the craft, and hard work? This question isn’t new; many people have published their views on it, at least with respect to writing ability in general.
Jack Kerouac thought the question was important enough to publish a newspaper article on whether writing ability is inherited (he concluded that good writers are made, but genius writers are born).
Divorce is the topic in Lorrie Moore’s short story “Paper Losses,” and in this story the protagonist, Kit (“Katherine” in the petition) struggles with the fact that her husband has, figuratively, turned into a space alien.
In this story, you get Kit’s perspective—including her take on the words “irretrievably broken.” She asks herself, “What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws?”
Here’s how not to be a second-rate poet when you write.
If you’re a lawyer, you know a thing or two about direct marketing, even if you don’t call it that. Direct marketing is the business of persuading someone (a potential client) to do something (contact you). And if you’re a sole practitioner or work in a small firm, odds are you’ve tried your hand at writing a bit of advertising copy.
If your ad copy was any good, you’ve been reaping the benefits: you’ve persuaded someone to call or send an email. In other words, you’ve given yourself the opportunity to turn more non-clients into clients, which is the primary function of your law firm website.
If clients haven’t been beating down your door, don’t lose heart. You, too, can write good copy, if you understand what copy is and what it isn’t. Part of writing good copy is knowing what not to do.
Using legalese when speaking to a jury can kill your chance to win. Since the jury can’t understand the words you are speaking, its members are unlikely to reach the conclusions you want them to.
Most professionals speak and write in language unique to their profession. That isn’t usually a problem when lawyers are communicating with lawyers (although it is less effective than plain English.) But when a lawyer needs to communicate effectively with a jury, legalese creates serious problems not only because the jurors do not know what your legalese means, but, even worse, because some of them think they know what some of these terms mean—but they don’t.
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