Litigation attorneys, also known as litigators or trial lawyers, represent plaintiffs and defendants in civil lawsuits. They manage all phases of the litigation from the investigation, pleadings, and discovery through the pre-trial, trial, settlement, and appeal processes. The USA  coverage focuses on commercial proceedings before state and federal court, circuit courts and US Supreme Court. A litigator is a lawyer that must master English to a higher degree than any other area of law. In addition to skills relating to negotiation, a litigator must create a strategy for each case that is subject to immediate change. Creativity and passion are the hallmarks of a good litigator, and expertise in legal English is a requirement.

Solving Drafting/ Editing Problems:

  1. Writing to Your Audience – One of the most important skills for a lawyer is to know their audience. We write differently when we’re writing to a Judge than when we’re writing to a client. Judge Richard Posner discussed this reality when he wrote “Successful communication requires the communicator to understand how much the person or persons to whom he is communicating  understands.” In the world of litigation, a lawyer may need to write complex legal briefs to the highest courts in the land, and at the same time, be able to explain the contents to a layperson client. The ability to take complex language and reduce it to something simpler is an asset for any lawyer. The cause of most bad writing is not laziness or sloppiness or overexposure to the Internet and video games, but the curse of knowledge: the writer’s inability to put himself in the reader’s shoes or to imagine that the reader might not know all that the writer knows — the jargon, the shorthand, the slang, the received wisdom.
  2. Organization – Organization is the key to successful legal writing, especially in litigation fields. Create a roadmap for your writing by using visual clues to guide the reader. Introduce your subject in an introductory paragraph, use transitional phrases (“furthermore,” “however,” “in addition,” etc.) between each paragraph, introduce each paragraph with a topic sentence, and use headings and  subheadings to break up blocks of text. Limit each paragraph to one topic and sum up your message with a concluding sentence or paragraph. Organizational structure guides the reader through your text and promotes readability.

Legal Writing Resources:

PERSPECTIVES FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES