If you want to draft a document in standard English, what can you do? If you are a transactional lawyer, and you now believe you have room to improve the language of the forms you use, here are my recommendations: 1. Get Adams’s Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. Although it might be a while [...]
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If not in plain English, then what? So if plain English is not right or cost effective for every document—especially large transactions with competent lawyers—what is the proper style for modern transactional drafting? According to Kenneth Adams, the leading expert on the subject, it’s called “standard English,” and he details that standard in his book, [...]
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If you need to draft in plain English, what can you do? There will be times you’ll need to draft in plain English. A corporate client needs a revised employee manual. Your supervisor asks you to draft a disclaimer for the firm’s website. A nonprofit organization you represent needs a basic contract. Or you need [...]
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The cost of revising forms into plain English. In fact, revising all your form documents into plain English may be unrealistically expensive and time-consuming. Who’s going to pay for it? Revising complex legal documents into plain English is taxing, tedious, and slow. The resulting plain-English only looks like it was easy to write. In reality, [...]
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What documents should be drafted in plain English? Not every transactional document needs to be drafted in plain English—there, I said it. Large transactions between knowledgeable parties who have lawyers do not need to be drafted in plain English. Yes, many plain-English principles would work well in those documents, and we do need to improve [...]
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Part 1: What is plain English—really? All legal writing should be appropriate for its audience—it should speak to the reader in words, sentences, and forms the intended reader can understand. Thus, transactional legal writing—legal drafting—should be appropriate for its audience: the parties to the transaction and, if they are represented by counsel, their lawyers. But [...]
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I excerpted the paragraphs in my “true topic sentences” posts from a real brief. I then rewrote the paragraphs. What followed those case-explanation paragraphs was an argument. I have rewritten it below. This court should affirm the summary judgment in Jensen’s action against the hospital just as the Oklahoma Supreme Court affirmed the trial courts [...]
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Comments on my post “Before and after true topic sentences” have prompted me to clarify the post and make some changes. One commenter pointed out that “if the proposition is basic and general, then there is no need to discuss the facts of cases so holding.” Unless, of course, you are discussing the cases as [...]
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