Dear Legal Writer,
Want to get faster at legal writing? Try the Flowers Paradigm.*
Here’s the “how-to”:
For any writing project, cut your process into 4 stages. It helps to think of the stages building a house:
“You can’t build a house until you have an idea for what it should look like.”
1️⃣ STAGE 1: The Madman. (I call it, “The Muse.”)
This stage is for brainstorming. You’re just supposed to get the ideas down—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
From there, you distill 3-4 core reasons for why one outcome is more likely (in a memo), or why the court should come out your way (in a brief).
Using the house analogy, you might choose the number of floors in the house.
—If three, your 1st, 2nd & 3rd floor would each be a “core feature,” like a “core reason.”
You next write out your core reasons in full sentences.
👉 Then hand off your vision to an architect.
2️⃣ STAGE 2: The Architect.
The architect next must design a blueprint, much like you must make an outline. Without at least a rudimentary one, you’ll be lost.
“You wouldn’t start building walls to rooms until you know where they will go.”
In this stage, you match all your other messy, smaller ideas with whichever core reason they relate to or support.
In the house analogy, you’d decide the number, purpose, and place of the various rooms on each core floor.
👉 Once you’ve got your blueprint, you pass it to a builder.
3️⃣ STAGE 3: The Builder. (“The Writer”)
The builder next needs to frame out the house, build the rooms, install the drywall, etc.
Here you write sentences to fill out the text of the subreasons, examples, logic, and reasoning.
N.B. Before I write, I also cut and paste all the court citations, case briefs, quotes, and other “meat” that I want to use in that section. That way, I’m not writing from scratch.
👉 The house then goes to the painter/editor.
4️⃣ STAGE 4: The Judge. (“The Painter/Editor.”)
Your painter now gets to make the house look “pretty.” I.e., revise, edit, cut, cut, cut.
“You wouldn’t start applying paint to walls that haven’t been built yet.”
You shouldn’t waste time editing a transition phrase or the style of a sentence only to have it end up in a different part of your brief where the phrase or style doesn’t fit, etc.
🔑 The key to all 3 initial stages is not to let your internal editor bud in early.
If you edit yourself when you’re trying to think, organize, and draft sentences, you’ll only stymie your creativity and stall your ultimate process.
Just get everything down. Worry about how “pretty” it looks later.
Fondly,
💌 Amanda
(*The above describes the famous framework from English professor, Betty Sue Flowers.* Bryan A. Garner brought Flowers to the legal writing world. Quoted are sentences that sound like what I recall Garner saying in a lecture on the topic years ago.)
🗳️ What is YOUR brief-writing process? Do you use Flowers, in whole or part?
#DearLegalWriter
#legalwriting