UPDATE: This seminar occurred in the past. View the complete list of upcoming seminars to discover live programs that are available now.
10 Tips for Clear and Direct Legal Writing is coming soon! This highly interactive and informative seminar is offered in Edmonton on February 19 and in Calgary on February 20.
Instructor Ben Opipari has been helping lawyers develop their writing skills since 2006. As he puts it, “people learn by doing,” and this seminar will provide you with plenty of opportunities to practice the skills Ben teaches in order to prepare you with great tips you can implement immediately to improve your persuasive writing style.
Find out more about what this seminar has to offer you. Ben talked to LESA this week in order to give practitioners a sneak preview of what to expect from this highly anticipated seminar.
Why will the 10 Tips for Clear and Direct Legal Writing seminar be valuable to practitioners? What will they gain?
I’ve always believed that good writing is good writing. I don’t care what you’re writing or who the audience is: if you’re writing a letter to a client or a letter to your grandparents, the same ideas still apply. … The benefit of this program is that it will teach practitioners of any practice area or any level the principles of good writing, from a style perspective. Because I think you can find the “Rules” – with a capital R – you know, the grammar rules – really anywhere, and honestly most of those aren’t even rules. I find that wherever I go people mistakenly think that there are certain rules they were taught, but they really aren’t rules – you’re not going to find them in any grammar guide – so what we really talk about a lot of times is just style. And that’s a much harder discussion to have, because it’s easy to know what bad writing looks like. We can almost always identify that. But good writing is nebulous. We can look at it and realize that it’s good, but the challenge is saying ‘Why is this good? And how can I take what this writer does and apply it to my own writing?’ … This is a valuable program because we look at a lot of samples of good writing. … Teaching is about showing models of what good people do and then telling people how they can apply that to their own writing.
What do you think will be the main takeaways for participants?
I’m big on variety in sentence length and sentence structure. We often don’t realize that writing is conversation, that there’s another person on the other end of this. Just like in oral communication, if someone stands up in front of a group with a monotone voice and doesn’t have any body language, they’re going to bore their reader. … The reality is that as readers we are dying for reasons not to read things. We love to be able to throw something away or delete it and not have to deal with it. Good writing makes people want to read it. … [One thing] I really stress is sentence variety in writing. I’ve found that a lot of legal writers tend to fall into the same sentence patterns over and over, and then everything looks the same. And when everything looks the same, nothing can be emphasized. When you can’t emphasize anything through sentence variety and length and structure, then we tend to bold and italicize and underline and all caps and all those things. So it’s really about those things: length, and structure, and the building blocks of a good sentence and of a good paragraph also.
Can you talk to me about the format of this seminar?
It’s very interactive. … I’ve been an educator all my life; I’m not an attorney. My PhD is in English literature and I was a college professor before I started working with law firms in 2006. I fully realize that a three hour program on writing has the potential to be the most boring topic ever, so it’s very interactive and highly discussion based. It’s by no means me sitting and lecturing for 3 hours. I’d say probably almost every slide we have elicits discussion. I think it’s important to hear other people’s views.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about the seminar?
One of the things in the program that I do is take good writing from a lot of different sources. A lot of the things we use are from magazines like the New Yorker or the Economist. People are always surprised [after the seminar]. They say, ‘Wow. I had no idea that was going to be that much fun and that entertaining.’ I often hear people say, ‘I had no idea 3 hours would go by so quickly.’ I think [that] really emphasizes the point that this isn’t a lecture format [seminar]. There’s a lot of discussion going on and me asking questions of the group. I think people enjoy that. People enjoy seeing good writing. I was a public school teacher when I first started teaching, and no teacher is ever going to say, ‘Hey, let’s look at awful examples of the skill I’m trying to teach you.’ I was a high school and college track coach, and I would never say to my athletes, ‘Let’s go watch bad runners and then you can emulate that.’ 10 Tips for Clear and Direct Legal Writing is an interactive program, because I think people learn by doing. Asking people in the audience to look at samples and revise them on the spot is a good way to get people to learn. … To give you my other track analogy, … I would never say to my athletes, ‘Hey guys, for practice today, you’re going to watch me run.’ The key is to get them to do it. I think that’s where people learn.
As you can see from this interview, Ben is a dynamic and engaging presenter. Register online now to secure your spot in this program in Edmonton or Calgary. To take advantage of the early bird registration price, register on or before January 13.
If you’re registering for this half day program, why not also take advantage of another half day program that LESA is running on the same day? How to Prepare for Mediation is being offered in Edmonton and Calgary.
