It is often said that law is a profession of language and writing. Legal language has been developed over centuries of practice and tradition. Legal writing becomes much easier and less intimidating once you have a plan to help you organize your ideas and guide your drafting process. While it is recognized that a legal document must be technically correct and accurate, the principle is that it must be understandable to its primary audience. Court document reviewers work with lawyers to determine if a document is genuine. For this reason, it is important to turn to legal definitions to describe the work of court document reviewers and interpret SWGDOC`s description. Latin as a legal language introduced terms such as client, condemnation, admission, mediation and legitimate as the most common in the English lexicon. Latin is also widely used for legal canons or legal maxims. Drafting legal documents such as contracts is different because, unlike most other categories of legal drafting, it is common to use language and clauses derived from form books, legal opinions, and other documents without attribution. Lawyers use standard documents when drafting documents such as contracts, wills, and judgments. The main difference between using sentences or paragraphs from other legal documents and copying them in other contexts or copying the entire document is that lawyers do use a common set of clauses that they adapt and modify for their own purposes.

[9] Moreover, legal language tends to be formalistic, such as laws, court decisions, and other primary sources of formal expression of authority and institution. Choose your best or most compelling arguments to focus on when writing, and then filter out additional supporting arguments. Use headings to divide sections and switch between arguments, and start new sections with summary sets. You may also find it helpful to use lists and bullet points to make your font scannable for the reader. Legal researchers and lawyers often use different laws, rules, and maxims to interpret legal issues. The second type of legal writing is persuasive. Examples of this type are calls and negotiation letters written on behalf of a client. The lawyer must convince his audience without provoking a hostile reaction due to disrespect or waste of time of the recipient with useless information. When submitting documents to a court or administrative authority, they must respect the required style of documents. The legal brief is the most common type of predictive legal analysis; It may contain the client`s letter or legal opinion. The legal memorandum predicts the outcome of a legal issue by analyzing the authorities responsible for the issue and the relevant facts that led to the legal issue.

It explains and applies the authorities in predicting an outcome and ends with advice and recommendations. The legal memorandum also serves as an account of research on a particular legal issue. Traditional and to meet the expectations of the legal reader, it is formally organized and written. The Plain Language Movement in Legal Writing is about avoiding complex language and terminology in legal documents in order to make legal drafting more understandable and accessible. [10] One of the goals of the movement is to reduce reliance on art concepts, words that have some meaning in the context of law, but may have a different meaning in other contexts. [11] When writing any type of legal document, state your point of view directly and clearly in the first few sentences to guide the reader. Let`s say the reader has very little time or patience, hates reading and will only read the first 200 words. What you say in these 200 words will help them decide to keep reading.

Legal writing often uses specialized terminology, which can be classified in four ways: Depending on the article you write, you may also find secondary sources such as legal dictionaries, legal reports, and academic journals that will help you with your research. For example, you need both primary and secondary sources to establish binding and persuasive authority. Academic legal research involves the application of the law, the establishment of analogies, the distinction of facts, and the development of legal arguments. What are the best legal writing tips that any lawyer and jurist could benefit from? Whether you`re a confident writer or not, legal writing is an important skill for any lawyer, regardless of the field you choose. Whether it`s court documents like applications, investigative documents, briefs and memos, or office communications like letters, client emails, internal memos, etc., it`s a lot of writing. Some maxims concern law in general, while others deal with the interpretation of legal language in particular, such as “ubi jus”, “ibi remedium” (where there is a right, there is a remedy) and “expressio unius exclusio alterius” (the expression of one implies the exclusion of the other). In addition to their role and relationship with you, think about the following: age, income and economic status, education level, values, and what they already know about what you write. This will help you determine your tone, style, and level of detail to include in your writing. For example, technical terms such as plaintiff, defendant, judge, trial, complaint, identifiable offense, jury, other or principles beyond reasonable doubt, negligence, wrongful detention, forfeiture and lis pendens are used exclusively in legal English.

Recently, a variety of tools have been developed to allow authors to automate essential parts of legal drafting.