In your opinion, what are problems with legal writing?

Question

I would say the overuse of nominalizations and prepositions.

Take this sentence, "Deliberations led to a finding of the defendant's guilt."

The nominalizations "deliberation" and "finding" correspond to the verbs "deliberate" and "find."

The question then becomes what character in the sentence deliberated and what they found. On this point, we are unclear if it was the judge or the jury.

Notice that by omitting this, the writer may have blocked us from analyzing the matter further since we do not know if the jury determined guilt or the judge did.

If the jury did, we can simply write, "After it deliberated, the jury found that the defendant was guilty." In this way, we avoid confusing nominalizations.

Further, note that we have eliminated the prepositions "to" and "of" in the original sentence.

These changes - the foregrounding of the subject; the transition from nominalizations to verbs; and the minimization of prepositions - helps to make the sentence clearer.

Answer 1

Legal writing suffers from excess use of the passive voice, which obscures who is doing what or who is responsible for what; it also typically uses excess jargon even when ordinary terms will do. These moves obscure the essential meaning, and the writers sometimes intend to be obscure (for instance, in writing statements of terms and conditions), more often it's just caused by following bad models of legal writing.

Writers can accomplish a great deal just by moving from jargon-filled over-nominalized prose to clear agent-action sentence structure in active voice. If, in addition to that, they pay careful attention to the flow and structure of their writing, signaling the key ideas to readers clearly at every step, they can produce briefs and articles that are easy to read and clear without sacrificing technical accuracy.