Appellate Law

Three Steps for Improving Your Legal Writing

By D. Todd Smith

Wayne Schiess, the head of UT's legal-writing program and author of Wayne Schiess's legal-writing blog, spoke to the Austin Bar Association's Solo & Small Firm Section last week.  Following the premise that lawyers are professional writers—an observation that applies with even greater force to appellate counsel—Prof. Schiess suggested a three-step process for improving one's legal-writing skills:

1. Practice:  I suppose it's a truism that you can't become good at anything without performing the task repeatedly.
    
2. Study:  Prof. Schiess recommends that we consult and rely on the best resources.  Aside from a good dictionary, The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, and his own Better Legal Writing, among others, Prof. Schiess praised Bryan Garner's The Red Book:  A Manual on Legal Style as a resource aimed directly at lawyers.
     
3. Open Yourself to Honest Critique.  Though self-explanatory, this step might be the most difficult of the three.

I felt pretty good after hearing what Prof. Schiess had to say.  I don't lack for practice, and I'd like to think I'm fairly open to honest critique, especially since clients and other lawyers review my work product on a regular basis.  (One might ask whether lawyers are good judges of effective legal writing, but that's the subject of another post.)  Where I need improvement is in the "study" phase.  Although I enjoy that part of the process—I have been a Garner disciple since I attended one of his seminars before I started my Big Law job more than 10 years ago—like everything else, it's a challenge to find the time.

Full post as published by Texas Appellate Law Blog on May 01, 2008 (boomark / email).