Legal writing

This formality can take the form of long sentences, complex constructions, archaic and hyper-formal vocabulary, and a focus on content to the exclusion of reader needs.

In particular, when legal content must be conveyed to nonlawyers, formality should give way to clear communication.

What is crucial in setting the level of formality in any legal document is assessing the needs and expectations of the audience.

And an email message to a friend and client, updating the status of a legal matter, is appropriately informal.

But a proxy statement allowing the members of a neighborhood association to designate their voting preferences for the next board meeting ought to be as plain as can be.

Yet many practicing lawyers, busy as they are with deadlines and heavy workloads, often resort to a template-based, outdated, hyperformal writing style in both analytical and transactional documents.

[citation needed] Recently a variety of tools have been produced to allow writers to automate core parts of legal writing.

In the United States, in most law schools students must learn legal writing; the courses focus on: (1) predictive analysis, i.e., an outcome-predicting memorandum (positive or negative) of a given action for the attorney's client; and (2) persuasive analysis, e.g., motions and briefs.

The author argues for one approach to resolving the legal matter and does not present a neutral analysis.

Plagiarism is strictly prohibited in academic work, especially in law review articles, seminar papers, and similar writings intended to reflect the author's original thoughts.

The key difference between using phrases or paragraphs from other legal documents, and copying in other contexts or copying the entire document, arises from the fact that lawyers are effectively drawing upon a common pool of clauses that they adjust and modify for their own purposes.

[14][15] Legalese is characterized by long sentences, many modifying clauses, complex vocabulary, high abstraction, and insensitivity to the layman's need to understand the document's gist.

Some important points in the debate of "legalese" v. "plain language" as the continued standard for legal writing include: Plain-English advocates suggest that no document can possibly cover every contingency, and that lawyers should not attempt to encompass every contingency they can foresee.