From em-dash to comma, the art of legal prose

‘You are now a professional wordsmith,’ said the senior partner in their keynote welcome speech when I joined the profession. This was the central message, along with the need to avoid – as the old joke has it – TLAs (three-letter acronyms, for the lone reader who has not heard that one before). It is true for all lawyers, though there is often a trade-off to be made between precision and elegance, particularly for the busy transactional lawyer. I was often told to ‘watch the adjectives’ in producing client materials.

To assist, Jill Barton, Professor of Legal Writing at the University of Miami Law School, looks to the US Supreme Court and its decisions for rules of precedent. This is on the basis that while ‘not all great writers are lawyers’, as Barton tells us at the outset, ‘all great lawyers are great writers’. Now, there are great writers and GREAT writers – those who are masters of their craft in distilling and communicating legal issues, and those who tell us something fundamental about the human condition. Barton is focused on the former, with a view to clarity: the approach taken by the justices on how to avoid jargon and to express exactly what you mean without undue flourish.

To do this, Barton revisits the basic building blocks of grammar – the first three chapters are no-nonsense, titled ‘Apostrophes’, ‘Brackets’ and ‘Commas’. Combing through pages of judgments, Barton identifies a rule and then provides examples. This is surprisingly engaging. Did you know, for example, that only four justices have used an exclamation mark in the last five years (page 40)? Do you know the difference between the em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen (Chapter 8)? I didn’t either: respectively to separate phrases, to use between numbers, and to use with compound words.

This is a brief and straightforward reference work that, given it is based on US legal writing, is refreshingly accessible and potentially useful for the non-US lawyer. The rules identified are to the point and of general application: keep sentences short; use the active voice; brevity is key (although this may baffle UK lawyers used to a two-pages-to-one-paragraph ratio of US to UK drafting). Of equal use to those who are new to the profession and those who have been around for some time, this is a book that demands we pay close attention to the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ we write.

Tom Proverbs-Garbett is a consultant