Let’s assume you’re not hopelessly wedded to space-wasting legalistic openers—“Now comes . . . by and through . . . and respectfully states . . . ,” etc. That’s a way to start something, and a supremely bad one at that. It squanders the most precious space you have: your beginning. Perhaps lawyers resort to it because they don’t otherwise know what to say at the outset. There are better alternatives.
At LawProse, we have certain convictions, one being that the purpose of your opening words is to state the problem clearly. Although we’re partial to Garner-style deep issues, discursive openers can also be effective.
Here’s one highly efficient way to produce a discursive opener:
- Take a legal pad and write “Introduction” at the top and your thesis statement at the bottom, where it will eventually become the last sentence of your opener.
- Think of the main rationale or occurrence that validates your thesis statement.
- In a few sentences at the top, explain the rationale or occurrence, avoiding disruptions in chronology. Revise these sentences as many times as necessary to make the sequence smooth and coherent.
- End with the thesis statement, transitioning to it lucidly.
Let’s say your thesis statement is this: “This Court should reverse the trial court’s judgment because the verdict does not support it.” If that’s the lead sentence, it’s conclusory: it raises questions rather than answering them. So you put it at the bottom and earn it with the rationale/occurrence passage mentioned in no. 3 above:
Introduction
To support punitive damages in this tort case, the jury was required to find, by clear and convincing evidence, that Vernerbock committed criminal theft. Yet the only relevant jury question asked whether Vernerbock “committed (a) inadvertent misappropriation, (b) conversion, or (c) criminal theft”—in the disjunctive. The trial court proceeded, in its judgment, to erroneously recite that the jury’s verdict found all three: a, b, and c. Given that there was no unequivocal finding of criminal theft, this Court should reverse the trial court’s judgment because the verdict does not support it.
The sequencing here progresses swiftly and logically. The advocate has avoided the common fault of beginning with the final sentence, which, if it appeared first, would be unearned and unpersuasive.
Next time you’re writing an introduction, try this technique.