Does the quality of writing matter?
I was speaking at a meeting of appellate specialists and was asked a 2-part question something like this:
- Are there any empirical studies showing that the quality of the writing in a brief has an effect on its success—does better writing win appeals?
- And if there are no such studies, what’s the point of all the books, articles, and CLE talks about improving legal writing?
I’ll answer these questions by restating them as I would understand them. It’ll take a series of posts.
More to come.
March 1st, 2011 at 5:07 am
An interesting question. And it would be interesting to conduct such a study. First you would have to define what a well-written brief is, second, you would have to make sure that the quality of writing is the only distinquishing characteristics of the briefs at hand, i.e. that the arguments presented in the brief are essentially the same. The first part would be doable, even though you would have to draw the line somewhere and thus introduce some arbitrary criteria. The second part would be much more difficult, because (a) a good lawyer must be able to argue (and write) well and good lawyers tend to be more successful with their appeals and (b) clear thinking and clear writing are very closely interrelated and it is difficult to determine what comes first, the quality of arguments or the manner they are presented. The second part of the study could be achieved through a research of cases that are appealed more than once, first time by a badly written brief, second time by a well written brief, which means that you would also have to account for the differences between courts and judges ruling on the case, and other associated variables.
I am looking forward to the upcoming series of post on this topic.