<p>From what I am told, lawyers are suppose to write efficiently. In their prose, they are suppose to use simple language and only cover what is necessary, avoiding verbosity and tangents (however interesting they may be.)</p>
<p>My question is, what happens to a lawyer who, although is an excellent writer, decides to write very colorfully when writing something for work; taking the opportunity to show off one’s writing skills rather than to ** only **communicate relevant points… Is such a lawyer looked down upon? Or can one even be fired for doing that?</p>
<p>I’ve heard English majors who get in love with flowery writing have a hard time adjusting to law school.</p>
<p>I was having one of my lawyer friends proof a speech i wrote for my debate class on tort reform. He suggested I cut out all the words I handpicked because of their lack of commonality, and try to condense my sentences to be more through, yet let verbose.</p>
<p>I didn’t take his advice and still got a 98, but I can imagine that when he’s reading legal briefs, he wants to get all the pertinent information without reading any more than is absolutely necessary.</p>
<p>such a lawyer would be repeatedly told to tighten up the writing and stop being creative. the attorneys they are writing their memos for are not going to want to sift thru their creativity to get to the point. senior attorneys don’t want to read lengthy treatises. they don’t want to read creative writing. they want the answers, well supported, direct and to the point. they are too busy to deal with other nonsense.<br>
i saw many associates who “thought” they wrote well, being counseled otherwise by senior attorneys who didn’t want to plow thru what they’d written.
save the creative writing for outside of work.</p>
<p>Lawyers are paid to achieve results for their clients. The overriding point of writing a brief is to persuade a judge to issue a desirable ruling; the point of sending a demand letter to persuade an adversary to undertake a desired course of action. If the reader perceives the subtext of a brief or a letter to be the writer’s narcicism, it will diminish the effectiveness of the writing.</p>
<p>Sometimes we use colorful phrases for a specific impact. However, for the most part, “creativity” in legal writing goes to coming up with creative and persuasive arguments based on the law and facts, not being colorful. As someone with lots of experience, I can say that 100% of those young lawyers who think they need to be colorful and to show off their writing skills are overestimating their own abilities. As many more senior lawyers will tell you when editing a younger lawyer’s writing, the first thing that goes are all adjectives and adverbs and anything that is repititous. As a law professor once told me, you got to keep it simple and as short as possible because chances are that the judge you are trying to convince does not have much time to read what you have written and likely graduated last in his class.</p>