Dear Legal Writer: Utilize vs. Use

Dear 1L Legal Writer, If you write “utilize” to mean “use,” please stop. “Use” is better. Here’s why:

🔷 1: Using “utilize” for “use” won’t make you sound smart.

More likely, you’ll come off as “trying to sound smart” — perhaps smarter than you really are. That’s a bad look.

⭐️ Unless you are positive that in your legal context, your Reader prefers “utilize” to mean “use” — does anyone? — just write “use.”

🔷 2: “Utilize” doesn’t only mean “use.”

—“Utilize” can mean “to use something in a new or unsanctioned way.” Similar meanings include, “to convert to an unintended use,” and “to give use to something otherwise useless.”

—“Utilize” can also mean “to make use of,” or “to make useful,” which is close to “use,” but not quite.

? Perhaps there might be an occasion to use “utilize” instead of “use” when you mean “to make use of” as something different than “use”? Even so, that will be most uncommon.

—When in doubt, stick with “use.”

My conclusion is this:

If you intend “utilize” to means something other than “use,” then it’s ok to use “utilize” instead of “use.”

⭐️ Otherwise, if you mean “use,” just write “use.”

🔷 3: “Utilize” is a needlessly long, multisyllabic word for “use.”

You don’t have room to spare in legal writing. Cutting your writing to your Reader’s page requirements will be hard enough.

Don’t add unnecessarily long or complex words when you don’t have to.

⭐️ “Use” saves four characters and two syllables over “utilize.”

For additional reading on language choices judges dislike, see Ross Guberman, “Judges Speaking Softly, What They Long for When They Read,” 44 Litigation 4 (Summer 2018); see also id. (“‘I loathe the word ‘utilize.’”)

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Will you stop using “utilize” for “use”?

Anyone prefer “utilize” instead of “use” when you mean “use”? Why?

Fondly,

💌 Amanda