LESA’s practice management materials, Effective Legal Writing Skills, teaches legal professionals the three principles of legal writing: clarity, vigour, and accuracy. Scroll below for a brief summary of each principle, and be sure to check out the full resource for helpful tips, examples, dos and don’ts, and a guide on how to draft emails, blogs, and memorandums. This paper is available for free! See below for details.
Principles of Effective Legal Writing
- Clarity in legal writing is essential. To give structure to your writing, first identify a theme and then draft an outline with listed points to support your theme. Each point becomes a paragraph with sentences that support the topic of that paragraph. Incorporate white space and be sure to include headings and subheadings to organize your text.
- Vigour in legal writing supports clarity and lends a “natural liveliness” to the words on the page. To strategically add vigour to your writing, use the active voice. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence initiates the action. In the passive voice, the subject receives the action. Vigorous writing also incorporates active verbs, jumps straight to the important words (for example, omits “It is important to note…”), and keeps the subject and verb close together.
- Accuracy is essential to a legal professional’s reputation and professional image. Consistency is key, as is maintaining a careful, thoughtful, and detail-oriented approach. Proofreading is an essential step to check for abbreviations, punctuation, and citations.
Chock-ful of of examples and helpful tips, this paper is available for free as part of LESA’s Complimentary Practice Management collection on the LESA Library. If you are already a LESA Library subscriber, you have automatic access to the Practice Management collection and can read the full paper here. If you are not yet a subscriber, but wish to access this and dozens of other free Practice Management resources, subscribe to our complimentary collection here.
