There’s an old maxim every lawyer should memorize before touching a keyboard: never take on a subject too bulky to be exhausted in the space you’re given. That limit—the word count, the page cap, the court’s firm ceiling—isn’t your jailer but your compass. It keeps you from wandering into the wilds of everything you happen to know about the case. A judge doesn’t want a guided tour through your research, but instead the straightest route to the ruling. Precision, not plenitude, is the mark of mastery.
Once you know you’ve got 30 pages, or (perhaps) 8,000 words, you know the size of the canvas. You can’t paint the whole landscape; you must choose your mountains. That means deciding, early, what’s truly persuasive—what points will actually move a judge from uncertainty to conviction. All the other discoveries you’ve made, however glittery, belong in your own notes, not in your brief. They may delight the amateur scholar in you, but they weary the professional reader before you. The art of advocacy is as much about omission as inclusion.
The trick is to see proportion not as self-denial but as architecture. A good brief feels balanced; it gives the reader a sense of motion and shape. The point is not to overwhelm but to guide—to draw the judicial mind along a clean line of reasoning without letting it sag under surplus weight. Every digression, every unnecessary citation, every sentimental flourish throws the frame off. The page limit is not the enemy; it’s the mold that gives your thought its final form.
So when the old maxim warns against “a subject too bulky,” it’s really urging a kind of humility before the limits of your medium. You can’t say everything, but you can say enough—and enough, in the right proportion, wins cases. A brief that fits its bounds exactly reads like work that has been thought through, not dumped in. Brevity here isn’t restraint for its own sake but the clearest sign that you’ve respected both the space given and the reader’s trust in your control of it.