Legal writing is technical and uses legal authority to construct opinions, statutes, and administrative regulations. It may use technical terms unique to the legal profession and aims to express legal opinions or persuade readers. It also involves drafting legal documents and using templates to streamline the process.
Legal writing is a type of technical writing used by professionals in the legal field. The basis for any type of legal writing is legal authority, and lawyers, judges, and paralegals construct opinions, statutes, and administrative regulations of courts to uphold or support its ideas. A legal writer always includes citations formatted appropriately for the legal authority he relies on, but the format may vary depending on the writer’s jurisdiction and audience. As technology has evolved, attorneys have increasingly relied on legal authority in electronic formats, which has fundamentally changed the subpoena formats prevalent in many jurisdictions.
Legal writing is technical in the sense that it often uses technical terms that a person who is not a legal professional is unlikely to understand. Some of the terms are unique to the legal profession, such as tort, or come from another language, such as voir dire, which is a French term. It may be necessary for attorneys to modify their writing somewhat to contain fewer technical terms when addressing clients or other non-lawyers.
The main goal of any legal document is to express the writer’s legal opinion on a particular issue. Writers also use some form of legal writing to persuade the reader of a certain position or opinion. For example, an attorney might file a legal memorandum in support of a motion he has filed in a court case, which gives legal authority to the basis of the motion and sets out his or her argument in detail. In other cases, the writer simply intends to inform the reader or simply to provide a legal opinion and the legal analysis on which this opinion is based. For example, a lawyer might write a letter to a client providing legal advice on an issue or problem she is facing.
Legal writing also applies to drafting legal documents, such as motions, petitions, and filing orders with the court system. Attorneys typically draft and file these documents or briefs with the court to seek a court order on a particular issue. Many times, judges write their orders after making a decision or ruling on a case that the attorneys have argued in court. Both attorneys and judges can use templates or forms for frequently used motions and orders, such as real estate contracts, which help streamline the legal drafting process.
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