Practice Management

Ray Ward: Client-centered legal writing.

By Dan Hull

In "The Vampires of Legal Writing", he notes that over-reliance on forms "tends to perpetuate bad legal writing." Hear, hear. Listen to our erudite friend in the Big Easy. WAC? thinks "forms" for agreements and discovery requests are more trouble than they are worth: a doorway to stale thinking, omissions and mistakes.

Forms will turn you into just more unhappy American law cattle. If your practice is the least bit challenging, forms just get in the way. They are bad--especially if allowed to become the main event. Clients lose.

See also Ward's "How to Write for the Client": "By eliminating the legalese and communicating like a human being, a lawyer can produce client-centered writing: something primarily for the client; something the client can readily understand."

Full post as published by What About Clients? on February 04, 2009 (boomark / email).