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 many get carried away.

Capitalize the name of a document only when you are referring to a specific document. “complaint,” “counterclaim,” “third-party complaint,” and similar terms are sufficiently generic that you never need to capitalize them.

For any delicate questions of capitalization, as well as other fine points of legal style, Bryan Garner’s Redbook is an excellent legal writer’s reference.

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 aside some time tomorrow. Whatever the Supremes have to say on legal writing is worth hearing.

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 Wrongs:

Defendant [prison guards] entered [plaintiff's] cell with plans for a party. And though [plaintiff] was invited to this party, his only purpose at this party was to be their personal pinata. Once Defendant[s] entered the cell they began putting a whooping on [plaintiff] like none he had ever experienced before. Each of the Defendant[s] took turns punching and kicking [plaintiff] in the head and torso of his body. Unfortunately, when the beating had ceased, no candy spilled out of [plaintiff], rather, he was left with three broken ribs from this brutal and savage attack.

(Emphasis added.) If that isn’t humorously-bad writing, maybe you need a copy of the Elements of Legal Style more than you thought.

[via Minnesota Lawyer Blog]

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 documents. Book fonts (i.e., fonts with serifs, and not newspaper fonts like Times New Roman) are far more appropriate. But don’t take my word for it. Here is what the 7th Circuit has to say (PDF link) in its excellent typography guide.

However, Helvetica is still a very popular font for graphic designers, and for good reason. There is even a fairly entertaining movie about Helvetica. But it quickly loses its appeal in long passages of text.

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, and en dashes, and how to use each:

(more…)