Joe Regalia Profile picture
Jul 18, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read Read on X
With a slew of #SCOTUS opinions comes lots of great #legalwriting examples!

In Justice Kagan's Wooden v. U.S. opinion, let's break down three simple tools we can all use:

1. TLDR Intros
2. Simple Sentences
3. Trendy Transitions

1/x
TLDR Intros (quick intros that dish the key points in a document) are now common with judges and lawyers alike.

How do the greats craft them?

1. Give readers context - why is this dispute here?
2. Insert choice details to prime
3. Highlight your legal pitch
In a paragraph, Justice Kagan orients you to the situation and highlights several charged facts:

(1) that the defendant faces a hefty 15-year sentence,

(2) that the lower court is piling on 20 years after the fact, and

(3) this was a single facility on a single evening.
She also includes her key legal pitch: It's absurd to base a statutory trigger on distinct moments in time rather than a common-sense understanding of a single event.
Great legal writers spoon-feed ideas to readers - using sentences that tend toward the simple. Many of the best sentences are so simple all they need is a period.

When great writers get more complex and pack more groups of words (and ideas) into a sentence, they have a reason.
The first sentence is a simple clause.

The second sentence offers two simple, related ideas.

The third sentence is again only two groups of words and a simple structure (a phrase with some context to set the scene for the officer's visit)...
The fourth sentence is another simple single-clause sentence. And then when we finally get a few groups of words in the fifth sentence, it's crafted complexity. A narrative sentence meant to convey unfolding events and a scene.
Finally, the greats often do two things with transitions.

First, transition by adding helpful guides to your sentences - don't just insert empty transitions like "furthermore" that tell readers "another point is coming."
Second, vary your transition phrases throughout your document so that readers don't notice them. And vary also by echoing words or concepts from the prior sentence (instead of always relying only on transition phrases).

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Let’s check out some powerhouse legal writing moves from two teams that couldn’t be more different:

An elite group at the U.S. Supreme Court led by @PaulWeissLLP and a small plaintiff’s firm out of Nevada. 1/🧵
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Easy-to-read and easy-to-understand briefs.

Let's see how (a🧵1/x)
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Check out how the @omelvenymyers pros remind you of enough specifics in a reply so that you can understand now. Image
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Check out some great examples from briefs filed this week across the nation. 1/
Check out how much Supreme Court regular Paul Clement and his team pack into the first sentence of a reply brief this week.

Those specifics dish up most of what you need to know—in the entire brief—with a single opener. Image
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Aug 2, 2023
What happens when legal writing pros at firms like @JennerBlockLLP and @bsfllp tackle a tough case?

Fantastic legal writing lessons for us all.

Check out how some of the best lawyers craft the crux, prime audiences to win, and list their path to victory! /x
Introductions are everything.

Legal readers these days want the specific questions and answers at the outset. If they can decide your case in five minutes, all the better!

Start by orienting readers to what your document is about and the questions they need to answer. Image
Prime with context.

If readers might be set out against you (as is often the case when appealing an adverse ruling below), prime readers with helpful context so they are in the best headspace to receive your argument. Image
Read 6 tweets
May 9, 2023
@Disney's complaint against Florida is a master class in advocating through pleadings.

A killer ToC, emotional priming, and surgical quoting give us a lot to learn from!

1/x
☑️ Emotional Priming: Reframe the Bad Facts.

The greatest legal writers don't run from the bad facts.

Instead, they often manage the bad in a couple of ways: (1) providing counter facts that detract from the bad or (2) reframing the bad facts so they look better. Image
☑️ More Emotional Priming: Shifting the Focus.

Now let's look at the other sort of emotional priming: sharing favorable details to detract or redirect your reader's attention. Image
Read 7 tweets
Mar 30, 2023
Who wants to see some data on what separates amazing legal writing from the run-of-the-mill stuff?

We compared 50 legal briefs from across the country with a random sample of 10 Justice Kagan opinions.

Any differences?

Oh, yea.

Here's some of what we found. 1/x
Fewer state-of-being and to-be verbs:

Justice Kagan used bland state-of-being verbs (like is, was, are, etc.) on average, 1 time for every 16 times the lawyers used them.
Varying verbs:

On average, Justice Kagan's writing contained 6-8 times more distinct verbs versus the lawyers' writing.

This reflects the justice's care in choosing verbs fit for each unique sentence's goal. The lawyers tended to repeat the same verbs again and again.
Read 13 tweets

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