This is from Richard C. Wydick's Plain English for Lawyers, which is my favorite and only reference guide for legal writing (and which is the real topic of this post). A supervisor at an internship suggested it to me, and I think it's really helpful. Legal writing is often totally abstruse and it's really hard as a law student not to want to pile in as many legalisms as possible. I myself enjoy writing about "proving up a case" and tossing in a "res ispa loquitur" from time to time, but it's probably not super useful in actually being understood. Wydick is clear about what not to do and has lots of good suggestions. Does anyone else have useful legal writing guides?
As a side note, I still have not wrapped my head around the format of a legal memo. The facts section makes sense, as does (obviously) the discussion section, but why can't the brief answer and legal question sections just be presented in a much more intuitive introduction section? Sigh . . . at least Legal Writing and Research died with 1L year.
