"Originally released to great acclaim in 2010, Typography for Lawyers was the first guide to the essentials of typography aimed specifically at lawyers. Author Matthew Butterick, an attorney and Harvard-trained typographer, dispelled the myth that legal documents are incompatible with excellent typography. Butterick explained how to get professional results with the tools you already have quickly and easily. Revised and updated & the second edition includes: new topics such as email, footnotes, alternate figures, and OpenType features; avice for presentations, contracts, grids of numbers, and court opinions; technical tips covering the newest versions of Word and WordPerfect for Windows and OS X; new font recommendations, including two that are free; new essays on the font copyrights, screen-reading considerations, and typographic disputes that have reached the courts; a refreshed layout, featuring type features designed by the author."--from Amazon.com website.

Clarity and precision in legal writing are essential skills in the practice and study of law. This book offers a straightforward, practical guide to effective legal style from a world-leading expert. The book is thoughtfully structured to explain the elements of good legal writing and its most effective use. It catalogues all aspects of legal style, topic by topic, phrase by phrase, usage by usage. It scrutinises them all, suggesting improvements. Its 'dictionary' arrangement makes it easy to navigate. Entries cover matters such as abbreviations, acronyms, active and passive voice, brackets, bullet points, citation methods, cross-referencing, fonts, document design, footnotes, gender-neutral language, numbering systems, plain legal language, punctuation, the use of Latin in law, structures for legal advices and documents, and techniques for editing and proofreading. Also covered are many words and phrases that non-lawyers find opaque and obscure-the aim being to show that lawyers can usually substitute a plain-English equivalent that captures the legal nuances of the 'legalese'. Other topics include ambiguity, deeds, definitions, provisos, recitals, simplified outlines, terms of art, tone, and the various principles of legal interpretation. With an emphasis on technical effectiveness and understanding, the book is required reading for all those engaged in the practice and study of law.

An eagerly anticipated second edition of this established and highly regarded text teaches the key practice skill of contract drafting, with emphasis on how to incorporate the business deal into the contract and add value to the client's deal. Features: More exercises throughout the book, incorporating More precedents for use in exercises Exercises designed to teach students how to read and analyze a contract progressively more difficult and sophisticated New, multi-draft exercises involving a variety of business contracts New and refreshed examples, including Examples of well-drafted boilerplate provisions More detailed examples of proper way to use shall Multiple well-drafted contracts with annotations Revised Aircraft Purchase Agreement exercise to focus on key issues, along with precedents on how to draft the action sections and the endgame sections. Expanded explanations of endgame provisions, along with examples and new exercises

The leading guide to clear writing!--StartFragment --—and clear thinking!--StartFragment --—in the legal profession for more than two decades, now newly updated. Admirably clear, concise, down-to-earth, and powerful—all too often, legal writing embodies none of these qualities. Its reputation for obscurity and needless legalese is widespread. Since 2001, Bryan A. Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English has helped address this problem by providing lawyers, judges, paralegals, law students, and legal scholars with sound advice and practical tools for improving their written work. Now the leading guide to clear writing in the field, this indispensable volume encourages legal writers to challenge conventions and offers valuable insights into the writing process: how to organize ideas, create and refine prose, and improve editing skills. Accessible and witty, Legal Writing in Plain English draws on real-life writing samples that Garner has gathered through decades of teaching experience. Trenchant advice covers all types of legal materials, from analytical and persuasive writing to legal drafting, and the book’s principles are reinforced by sets of basic, intermediate, and advanced exercises in each section. For this third edition, Garner has retained the structure of the previous versions, with updates and new material throughout. There are new sections on making your writing vivid and concrete and on using graphics to enhance your argument. The coverage and examples of key topics such as achieving parallelism, avoiding legalese, writing effective openers and summaries, and weaving quotations into your text have also been expanded. And the sample legal documents and exercises have been updated, while newly added checklists provide quick summaries of each section. Altogether, this new edition will be the most useful yet for legal professionals and students seeking to improve their prose.

In twenty-two chapters, divided into six parts for convenience, the authors not only lay bare the art of lawyering but also provide invaluable nuggets of perfecting and excelling as a solicitor and advocate. There is little doubt that the contents of this book dramatically make a lawyer, especially the lawyer in Africa, to be more effective, more skilful and a proper lawyer useful to the client and society.

This book is an introduction to integrating professional ethics into legal writing. By providing an ethical context for all forms of legal writing, Johns introduces the reader to the responsibilities attached to every document a lawyer authors. The book starts the reader off in law practice, stressing the need for ethical responsibility, civility, and professionalism in the practice of law. Professional Writing for Lawyers is designed to complement Richard Wydick's Plain English for Lawyers. By using these books together, readers will learn to approach writing as a process of thinking, outlining, drafting, revising, and editing to produce a final draft. To help the reader understand this process, several examples are rewritten, integrating the principles of Plain English that teach the reader to develop a clear, concise, and readable style. A teacher's manual is available.

An indispensable aid for anyone who prepares legal documents ? including law students, law professors, practicing lawyers, and judges ? Garner's The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style provides the comprehensive guide to the essential rules of legal writing. It gives detailed, authoritative advice on grammar, style, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, footnotes, and citations, with illustrations in legal contexts. The Redbook focuses on the special needs of legal writers, emphasizing the ways in which legal writing differs from other styles of technical writing. Its how-to sections cover editing and proofreading, numbers and symbols, overall document design, and more. The Redbook also gives tips on preparing briefs and other court documents, opinion letters, demand letters, research memos, and contracts. It explains the correct usage of and provides everyday English translations for more than 1,000 words that are often troublesome to legal writers, 200 terms of art that take on new meanings in legal contexts, 800 words with required prepositions in certain contexts, and 500 stuffy phrases and needless legalisms.