Last week I received an email from an associate with an attachment: a one-page letter to the opposition attorney. The email consisted of one sentence: “Is it okay to send this?” Here are the first two lines of the attached letter, word for word, the punctuation as it was on the letter:

This letter hereby rejects your EBT notification dated March 23, 2007 from my client’s father scheduled for August 23, 2007. I admit I laughed a lot when I opened it considering we spoke last week and you told me He said he was looking to get me a date for the deposition of his clients that he had previously requested to be postponed.

Yes, that was written by a lawyer. I still can’t read it without being ashamed. Unfortunately, the same can be said for much of what we write. It does not have to be this way. In fact, as lawyers, language is perhaps our most important tool. The clearer and more concise we write, the better we will be. Here, then, are some tips gleaned from a few years trying to do just that:

o Know your audience. For lawyers, this means really thinking about who will read your writing. If you file or oppose a motion in a busy New York City trial court and write a 30-page report, don’t expect it to be read. On the contrary, if you present documents to a Federal District Court, it should be perfect because the judge and his paralegal will read every word.

o As Thomas Jefferson said, “[t]The most valuable of all talents is never using two words when one is enough. In other words, cut the fat.

o Don’t use “then” when you want to say “what”. This is one of the most common and horrible mistakes I have seen over the years. “Then” refers to a point in time. “That” refers to a choice, or “as opposed to”. Therefore, “I’d rather watch TV than do housework” or “So I decided it would be better to go to work.” The two words cannot be used interchangeably.

o Use apostrophes appropriately. Just because a word ends in “s” does not mean that an apostrophe precedes the “s”. Therefore, serving more than one subpoena does not make the word “subpoena.”

o A corollary of the previous rule is to learn the proper uses of “it” and “its”. “Is” is the contraction of “is”. “His” shows possession and has no apostrophe. Then we would write “it is a good case” or “the defendant is responsible for the acts of his contractors”, but never, for example, “the defendant is responsible for the acts of his contractors”.

o Finally, consider your font / format. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have spent tens of years and billions of dollars designing fonts that don’t look like they came out of a 1960s typewriter. So why would anyone use Courier? Or does it not fully justify the margins? Arial may seem a bit informal for some legal documents, but certainly Times New Roman or Garamond is preferable to a document that looks like it has just come out of an IBM Selectric.

This is certainly not intended to be a comprehensive review of legal writing or the epitome of clarity, just something to think about.