LawProse Lessons

One of our former interns, now a BigLaw paralegal, paid us a visit yesterday. (He’s taking the LSAT today, so fingers crossed.) He recently took our Advanced Legal Writing & Editing online seminar, and he was all but gushing about how much more effective he’d become at editing briefs for the lawyers at his firm—especially […]

Fabricated citations have become a real problem in courts across the country. As of this month, the public database tracking AI-hallucination incidents in court filings has climbed past 1,700 cases worldwide—up from a few hundred as recently as six months ago. The curve is steep, and it’s not slowing down. The Tenth Circuit underscored the

Complaints about “AI prose” often miss the real issue: the problem isn’t the machine but the editor. Two things are usually going on. First, readers sometimes mistake unfamiliarity for inferiority. AI systems draw on a wider range of punctuation and syntactic patterns than many lawyers typically use. What feels “off” may simply reflect the lawyer’s

The new 7th pocket edition of Black’s Law Dictionary arrives this week—and it’s the rare desk reference you’ll actually use. It puts a working lawyer’s vocabulary in your hand: compact enough to carry, dense enough to repay five minutes of browsing between tasks. This isn’t a book for the occasional lookup. It’s a book you flip through

“It’s all up here in my head. I just can’t get it on paper.” Almost nobody who says this is right. What’s “up there” usually isn’t a finished argument waiting to be transcribed. It’s a feeling of understanding, a loose web of associations, and perhaps a few good phrases. The mind quietly supplies missing links

Cocounsel tells you, “Redline the draft all you want.” The line sounds generous; the premise is shaky. It assumes that the draft is redlinable. Often it isn’t. Some drafts don’t call for tweaks; they call for a total do-over. The structure is off, the theory wanders, the emphasis misses the point. The “redline” then becomes

Legal writing often goes wrong at the extremes: either it stiffens into archaic formality, or it relaxes into casual chatter. Both weaken the writer’s authority. Unduly formal prose—crowded with herein, aforementioned, and tortuous sentences—doesn’t signal precision. It signals distance and strain. But writing that sounds offhand (basically the court punted, that argument won’t hunt) swings

“How will I begin?” That question trips up even seasoned lawyers, and it often decides whether a brief lands or falls flat. The rule isn’t new, but it’s demanding: your first sentence must grab attention. If it doesn’t, you’ve already lost ground.  Judges read fast and skeptically. Your opening can’t wander. It must frame the

Most people open a dictionary to settle a question. The wiser reader opens it to start one. A good dictionary, being an invitation to roam, teaches the mind to wander with purpose and to notice how language gathers meaning through shade and proximity. The best discoveries come not from the term you mean to look

Anything that can be thought can be written. That dictum is both challenge and liberation for the legal writer. If a concept can take shape in your mind—even faintly, even clumsily—it can be captured in words. Law thrives on precision, but precision starts with the audacity to express what seems unsayable. A writer who believes

Ralph Waldo Emerson warned: “The first rule of writing is not to omit the thing you meant to say.” Legal writers sometimes break this rule in the name of caution: softening conclusions, hiding behind abstractions, or burying the bad fact in a dependent clause. Yet legal readers reward clarity, not self‑protection. A lawyer who won’t say the

In the legal world, writing isn’t an accessory; it’s the work itself. Every transactional, regulatory, or legislative document must be hammered out in language tough enough to carry legal weight and, later, survive attack. Yet the language in which we must frame ideas is inherently unstable. Words stretch, meanings drift, and no clause remains perfectly

Professionals can improve their writing at any age because the brain remains adaptable, and writing itself is a craft driven more by technique than fixed talent. Neuroscience shows that neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to form new connections, persists throughout adulthood when we practice challenging skills with focus and feedback. Writing draws on composite abilities—such as

To say that editing is an act of friendship is to recognize how it affirms both the writer’s effort and the reader’s experience. When you involve an editor—whether by choice or assignment—it means your writing is meant for more than just your own eyes. The work is being readied for a broader audience, and the

If writing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well every time. Every line you shape trains your ear, sharpens your rhythm, and builds reflex. Careless sentences in emails or quick notes don’t just waste words but weaken your craft. When you take the time to tighten a sentence in a thank-you note, you’re building the precision

William of Ockham was a 14th‑century Franciscan friar from the village of Ockham, Surrey. We now spell his name and the place “Ockham,” but the Latin form Occam gave us the standard label for his best‑known principle: “Occam’s Razor.” The “razor” is only a metaphor: it’s a mental tool for shaving away whatever is unnecessary

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) thought deeply about why readers so often “don’t get” what writers believe they’ve made perfectly clear. He posited that getting a thought from your head onto the page is easy, but getting that same thought from the page into another person’s head is hard. The writer is coasting downhill, carried by earlier

When Sir Arthur Quiller‑Couch told writers back in 1916, “Murder your darlings,” he wasn’t urging literary bloodshed for sport. He was offering a practical warning about vanity disguised as brilliance. By his terms, a darling is a sentence, an image, or a turn of phrase you love—not because it strengthens the work but because it

You’ll often hear what seem to be contradictions about writing. For example, Jean de La Bruyère (1645–1696), a 17th‑century French moralist and satirist, quipped: “It is the glory and merit of some people to write well, and of others not to write at all.” The line is a refined insult: some people genuinely honor themselves