LawProse Lessons

LawProse Lesson #67 What’s the most frequent and serious mistake in brief-writing and motion-writing? Answer: Failing to frame the deep issues on page 1 — so that anyone, anyone, will understand the essential legal problems to be solved. It should be a dispassionate but persuasive statement of the issues. For instruction on precisely how to […]

LawProse Lesson #69 How should point headings be formatted?ANSWER: Please attend to this. Ideally, they’re complete sentences that are single-spaced, boldfaced, and capitalized only according to normal rules of capitalization — that is, neither all-caps nor initial caps. Even if court rules require headings to be double-spaced, all the other rules nevertheless apply. All-caps headings betoken