Write as Badly as You Can! (if you want to lose…)

Posted on Posted in Legal Writing and Citation

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*

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