Writing is a central part of every lawyer’s day-to-day life. From legal briefs and court documents to client communications, you may spend an enormous part of your work day writing. Being able to communicate well in writing and to adapt your style to different audiences is a valuable skill to cultivate.

There are a few simple things you can do to elevate your writing. Read on to discover our top ten legal writing tips for persuasive, engaging pieces.

1. Keep Your Purpose in Mind

Before you begin writing, it’s incredibly important to determine what the purpose of your writing is. This can shape everything from the structure of the piece to the tone and even the placement.

Your writing can have a number of purposes, including:

  • Contributing to your content library to improve your SEO
  • Establishing you as an expert in the field
  • Educating your audience about a question or misconception you see frequently
  • Communicating with your leads and clients about the latest happening at your firm
  • Providing an update on a recent development that impacts your clients (new laws, etc.)
  • Establishing a clear contract that protects both you and the other party
  • Persuading other legal professionals to see a case in the light you want
  • Requesting feedback from your clients so you can improve your service
  • And so many more!

Take some time before you begin and decide what purpose this piece will serve. Write it down, and refer back to it as you begin writing. This will help you keep your writing concise and on topic.

2. Focus on Your Audience

In addition to your purpose in writing the piece, it’s also crucial to consider who you’re writing this piece for.

Legal writing can be aimed at anyone from the everyday person looking for answers to their legal questions to judges reviewing the details of your case. Obviously the tone and terminology you use for each of these audiences is going to vary widely.

Law school does a pretty thorough job of teaching you how to write for your fellow legal professionals, but the public-facing content you write should not take that same tone.

The content that goes up on your website or that you send out in emails or surveys should be much less formal, more conversational, and easier to understand.

Your audience can also impact how much detail you need to go into in your writing. The average client searching for legal answers doesn’t need to know every technical detail of the legal statutes that impact their case; another legal professional might.

3. Research Thoroughly

With your purpose and audience firmly established, it’s time to dive into one of the biggest parts of legal writing: research.

As a lawyer, every bit of communication you put out is held to a higher standard. Of course, documents that are involved in the management of a case cannot include mistakes, but did you know that even your web content has to meet rigorous standards of veracity?

Google and other search engines have a standard they call “Your Money, Your Life.” This means that any industry that has a serious impact on readers’ money or their lives – finance, medicine, and, yes, law – are required to maintain a high level of accuracy in their writing.

If your writing is full of incorrect information, your website could get blacklisted, and you could find it almost impossible to grow your site traffic.

So treat the research for your public-facing writing every bit as seriously as you treat research for your case-related writing. Unless you work with a specific topic or statute on a daily basis, take a minute to double-check it before you write about it.

These standards are the reason that all LawRank client content is both written and edited by lawyers. We know you’re being held to the highest standards, so we hold ourselves to nothing less.

4. Start with an Outline

You probably don’t need us to tell you how intimidating and overwhelming it can be to stare at a blank page, knowing you have to write a multi-thousand-word document and having no idea where to start.

Using an outline can make that process much more approachable, as well as making sure your piece flows well, stays on topic, and covers all the points it needs to.

Start by introducing your topic at the top – why does the reader care about this piece, and what information is it going to cover? Are there any concepts you need to cover before you’re ready to dive into the main body of the piece?

Make sure to break down each outline topic into manageable chunks. Not only will this make your writing process easier, but it will also make your finished piece easier for readers to navigate and consume.

5. Just Get Started

Once your outline is done, it’s time for the most intimidating step in the writing process – beginning. That blank page can still feel overwhelming, and you may feel pressure to write the perfect article on the first draft.

The best advice we can give is to just get started. Remember, you can always edit bad writing, but you can’t edit a blank page.

Some people find it helpful to write at the top of their page, “This is going to be the worst draft of this article,” or even to write in a silly font like Comic Sans. If you use these tricks, just be sure to undo them before your article gets published.

Start by focusing on getting the facts on the page – no transitions or beautiful introductions. In fact, skipping the intro and starting with the meat of the article can be incredibly helpful.

And remember, there’s no rule that says you have to write your piece in order. If one section is hanging you up, but you’re prepared and even excited to write a different section, go do that one first!

No matter what, just get words on the page. You can always edit to make them better once they’re written.

6. Write from the Top Down

As you’re progressing through your outline, it’s a good idea to focus on writing from the top down. This means starting with the point you want to make and then going on to the facts that support that point.

It can be helpful to structure your outline this way. 

For instance, if you’re writing an article about how much car accident victims can recover, start by explaining that the amount can vary. Then go on to discuss the variables that impact the amount, and finally discuss the things that clients can do to impact their settlement amount.

You may also want to keep this approach in mind within each section of your outline. Starting with the point you want to make can make your material easier to skim and help to keep your readers engaged.

7. Prioritize Clarity

So often in legal writing, it’s easy to get caught up in qualifiers, clarifications, and disclaimers. But these additions can make sentences long, convoluted, and hard to follow.

Any time you’re writing for the general public (and often when you’re writing for your legal colleagues) it’s a good idea to prioritize clarity. Assume that your reader will only read the first three sentences of your piece unless you convince them to stick with it.

There are a few simple things you can do to make your writing clearer and more concise.

  • Write in active voice. Active voice is a structure in which the subject performs the verb, rather than the verb being performed by the subject. So instead of writing “The defendant was sued by our client,” write, “Our client sued the defendant.”
  • Use the Oxford comma. The Oxford comma is a punctuation mark that follows the second-to-last item in a series. For instance, you might communicate with clients via email, text message, and phone calls. (And if you don’t think this is important, a company lost a lot of money in a lawsuit that was decided by exactly this issue!)
  • Avoid unnecessary adjectives. Not only do adjectives clutter up your writing, but they’re often used in place of a more descriptive word that could make your writing stronger. Instead of “said quietly”, for instance, write “whispered”, “murmured”, or “mumbled”.
  • Simplify double-negatives. You should never use double negatives if it can at all be avoided. Instead of writing “We didn’t want to not respond,” write “We wanted to respond.”
  • Keep your tenses consistent. Switching verb tenses in the middle of a piece of writing can be confusing and distracting to your readers. If you start writing in present tense, keep the rest of the piece in present tense (and so on with past and future tenses).
  • Stick to “they” pronouns. Writing “he or she” has fallen out of fashion these days in favor of the much more succinct gender-neutural “they”. This can also help to anonomyze your writing and respect the gender identities of the people you’re writing about.

It’s also a good idea to read through your piece and look for opportunities to simplify your language. Most of the time, there’s no good reason to use “expeditiously” when you can say “soon” or “quickly” instead.

8. Use Jargon Sparringly

Along those same lines, you want to use legal jargon as sparingly as you reasonably can, especially when you’re writing for the general public.

Legal concepts can be complex and difficult to understand even when they’re couched in the plainest language. Discussing them in legalese can make your writing almost impossible for non-lawyers to understand.

Keep in mind that this rule applies just as much to your correspondence with individual clients as it does to your blog posts, website content, and email newsletters. 

Part of your goal each time you communicate with your clients should be to build more trust in you and your firm. If you write in confusing legal jargon, they may start to feel disconnected from you or even like you’re talking down to them.

Any time you’re writing to a non-lawyer, review your work to make sure it doesn’t contain any legal jargon and that you’ve explained any concepts that your reader may not already be familiar with.

9. Edit Your Work

Once the first draft of your piece is written, it’s time to dive into editing. There are several tips and tools you can use to make your writing better and more accessible for your readers.

Avoid Common Grammatical Mistakes

First, take a look through your content for common grammatical mistakes. Although these errors may seem small, they can cause your audience to lose faith in your credibility. Remember, the better you communicate with your audience, the more they’ll be inclined to trust you.

Start by running a spelling and grammar check in whatever word processor you’re using. Then make sure you don’t have any of the following grammar errors:

  • Comma splices – Never connect two complete sentences with a comma. (I.e. “Blog posts can be a fantastic addition to your content strategy, you may want to publish one each week.”) Each sentence should be separated by a period, question mark, or (in rare cases) an exclamation point.
  • Sentence fragments – On the other hand, you don’t want to cut a sentence off midstream. Each of your sentences should be able to stand on its own. 
  • Improper capitalization – Modern grammatical convention doesn’t capitalize job titles (except for heads of state), college degree programs (i.e. law school), or family members (i.e. his father). As a rule, capitalize only proper nouns, including names of specific organizations or locations, and review current capitalization guidelines before you start editing your work.
  • Consistent numbering convention – There are a couple of different numbering conventions you can use, but the important thing is to be consistent. AP Style uses numerals for 10 and above. Chicago Style writes out all numbers up to 100 and then switches to numerals. Either is acceptable, but be sure to stick to one throughout your writing.
  • Correct use of homophones – Remember, “they’re” = “they are”, “their” indicates someone’s possession, “there” indicates location, “you’re” = “you are”, “your” indicates the possession of the person you’re speaking to, “it’s” = “it is”, and “its” indicates a quality of an inanimate object.

Checking for these common errors can make your writing much cleaner before you dive into more in-depth editing.

Use Editing Tools

There are several helpful editing tools you can use to easily improve your writing.

Grammarly is a web browser plugin that acts as an extra-effective spelling and grammar checker. Not only will it catch typos, spelling errors, and common grammar mistakes, but it can even suggest ways to reword cumbersome sentences.

Hemingway is a website that gives you a view of the complexity of your writing. It will assign your work a reading comprehension grade level; it’s a good idea to keep your work at a ninth-grade reading level or below. It will also highlight instances of passive voice, adverbs, and overly complex sentences or words.

Read Your Work Out Loud

Often, when we’re writing, we tend to adopt an over-formal, stilted tone. And when we try to edit our own work, our brains tend to skip over the mistakes we’ve made.

Both of these issues can be addressed by reading your work out loud.

As you’re reading, listen for phrasing that sounds strange or stiff. Think about the way you’d explain the same concept to a client in person or to a friend, and adjust your writing to be closer to that tone.

You’ll also be surprised how many small errors you catch when reading your work aloud. Fix these as you go, and then read back over it to make sure everything looks and sounds good.

10. Read Others’ Work

One of the best ways you can improve your writing is to read work from others you admire.

When you read good writing, you learn new ways to explain or express things, and you start to absorb some of that tone into your own writing.

Look for legal blogs and newsletters from attorneys you admire, and start following them. Keep in mind that your competitors may be among those you want to follow. Not only will you improve your writing by reading theirs, but you can get a good view of how they’re marketing to your target demographic.

Read each new blog or newsletter from these writing mentors. Pay attention to how they structure their pieces, the tone they use, how they explain legal concepts, and so on.

Put Your Writing to Good Use

Being able to write well, both for lawyers and laypeople, is a critical skill for an attorney. When you start writing a new piece, focus on the purpose that writing serves and what its audience will be. Do your research, write an outline, and edit your work thoroughly before you send it out into the world.

If you’re looking to establish a content strategy to grow your law firm, LawRank wants to help. We provide legal marketing that works, including content marketing, SEO, web design, and more. Contact us today and start getting content that’s written and edited by lawyers to build up your website.