Write as Badly as You Can! (if you want to lose…)
Take a look at Gerald Lebovits’ ten rules for poor legal writing, in Writing Bad Briefs: How to Lose a Case in 100 Pages or More,* then reverse them if you indeed would like some success. Tongue in cheek, his advice includes:
- Make it look as bad as possible
- Include as many issues as you can, and don’t follow any logical order
- Lots and lots of long, long quotations
- Close is good enough when it comes to citations
- Rules are meant to be broken
- Make it personal – use a lot of derogatory language and name-calling
- Include only the facts that favor you and hide the bad stuff
- You’re a lawyer not an editor – forget spellcheck, proof reading and cite checking
- Substance doesn’t count
- Confuse them with words
*Lebovits, Gerald, Writing Bad Briefs: How to Lose a Case in 100 Pages or More (April 2011). Suffolk Lawyer, Vol. 27, No. 24, April 2011 . Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1799062*
