The biggest complaint I hear from associates about legal writing is that the partners are constantly rewriting everything they write.

The result is that associates lack confidence in their legal writing.

Dear Legal Writer,

Here’s everything you need to know:

🔸 To begin, “myriad” means “a countless number of specified things,” (Oxford English Dictionary), or “too many to count.”

Here are 7 sayings that I heard for the first time at a firm.

Learn these today, so you won’t hear them, feel clueless, and be left to wonder.

⬇️

🔸 “I forgot how ‘green’ they are.”

It’s called “Dear 1L: Notes to Nurture a New Legal Writer,” and it’s due out June 25, 2024.

🔹 If you read it, you’ll learn:

-What to expect every month of 1L
-How to research & write the 1L fall memo

“A triumvirate of murine rodents totally devoid of ophthalmic acuity were observed in a state of rapid locomotion in pursuit of an agriculturalist’s marital adjunct.

Said adjunct then performed triple caudectomy utilizing an acutely honed bladed instrument generally used for the subdivision of edible tissue.

Dear Legal Writer,

I’ve been seeing “plethora” used inappropriately in WAY too many LinkedIn posts from legal peeps recently:

▫️ “We discussed a plethora of topics on the podcast.”
▫️ “Our new expert witness has a plethora of good ideas.”
▫️ “Jane has a plethora of adorable pets at her house.”

🔹 I was hired fresh out of college and had no experience. There were 6 of us, plus a paralegal manager, and she was the only one with prior experience.

—Luckily, when I was brand new here in Sept 2021, Jay’s posts were some of the first in my feed.

—That first year, I didn’t let a work day go by without reading Jay.

We were 4 toddlers strapped across the back seat that day—two to a seatbelt, in the 1972 carpool, as then was the way.

I must have had my mother tell me the story of that morning a million times. It became a bedtime ritual.

“As” has as many meanings as cats have lives: 

NINE to be exact:

9️⃣ to the same degree or amount

              (“it was as hot as the sun”)

8️⃣ for instance

            (“such as”)

Read it out loud.

Not to yourself.
Not in your mind.
I mean out loud—
loud and with conviction.

Here’s what I predict:

It could list:
—the firm’s style preferences,
—each partners’ pet peeves, and
—common mistakes to search for and avoid.

That would require associates to self-edit and polish BEFORE they hand in a draft. 

Here’s a full how-to:

🔷 WHAT is it?

An em-dash—which looks like these here—is a punctuation mark that shows a break in a sentence.

New lawyers “don’t know how to write.”

▪️ The law firms blame the law schools.

▪️ The law schools blame the colleges.

Instead, should it say, “legal-writing coach”?

Hmmm. Let’s look at the 3 rules on “phrasal adjectives”:

1️⃣

DO HYPHENATE