Legal Writing

Perhaps the most ridiculous construct I see and hear regularly is the conditional introductory phrase that prefaces content in documents with, “If you are reading this,” or that starts voicemail greetings with, “If you are hearing this message.”

An infinitive is the barest form of a verb. Usually, we refer to a verb form as an infinitive when we use “to”: to go, to run, to think. If you studied a foreign language, you probably learned the infinitive form of verbs and then how to ...

Recently I read an article on content marketing that promised to tell, in so many words, “how to market yourself without extra work.” It then presented an app, showing "how easy it is to automate repurposing your content.” “Once you have your ...

Lawyers writing books is certainly no grand innovation on the marketing front. If you can write a legal brief, you can write a book. But why should you? There are a number of reasons: 1. Authority. A book on a subject you practice daily with ...

Of all the unexpected gifts from our respective law schools (debt, alcoholism), one of the worst may be a ghastly writing style that appeals only to law school professors and some judges. Don’t get me wrong. Law school provided its fair share of ...

Writing and editing marketing copy — for a brochure, proposal, website, whatever — can be a high-wire act. If there's more than one lawyer in your practice, you know it's true: Make editing a group event, and it becomes a management nightmare. ...

"One of the only": the ambiguous phrase that keeps popping up. I don't know what this means — and neither do your readers. A recent newspaper story about Martha Stewart’s sale of her brand quoted a branding maven: “When [Stewart] started, she ...

When lawyers and law firms get focused on “creating content” (for those of you living in caves, that's what "writing" is now called), they think mostly about the subject matter. And that makes a lot of sense, for obvious reasons. But often ...

Even the best writer can sometimes confuse words that sound almost the same — call them sound-alikes. A prior post reviewed many of the ...

Maybe you’ve read the stories about the candidate who wasn’t hired because of spelling errors in the resumé. Or the firm that lost the bid in response to a request for proposal because of grammatical errors on its website. It’s not just lawyers ...