Legal Writing

Check out our favorite 2024 photo galleries

From cartoon captions to court rulings that shaped the Endangered Species Act to book recommendations for lawyers, the ABA Journal presents our favorite photo galleries from this year. Which photo gallery was your favorite?

Dec 20, 2024 9:18 AM CST

‘Hot-tubbing’ and ‘coffee badging’ among top 2024 words in law

Top words in law for 2024 include catchy ways to describe minimal workplace attendance and expert-witness conferences, according to the list recently unveiled by Burton’s Legal Thesaurus.

Dec 18, 2024 8:47 AM CST

25 Books for Lawyers

The ABA Journal asked attorneys to share reads they found inspiring, insightful and useful in the practice of law. Here are 25 of their suggestions.

Dec 1, 2024 3:00 AM CST

When writing motions and briefs, typography matters

Of all the easily fixed bad habits that pervade legal writing, perhaps none is more perniciously persistent than some brief-writers’ insistence on capitalizing each word of point headings.

Dec 1, 2024 1:50 AM CST

Obbligato: What They Don’t Teach You in Law School

Read the winner of the 2024 ABA Journal/Ross Writing Contest for Legal Short Fiction, written by Rita Radostitz, a former public defender who represents a detainee at Guantanamo Bay.

Nov 25, 2024 8:58 AM CST

This 4-word phrase was deemed scariest to lawyers in blog contest

Above the Law has revealed the winner of its contest for the four-word phrase most likely to scare a lawyer.

Nov 20, 2024 8:58 AM CST

Court reporting and the evolution of legal support

Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Greg Hong, the co-founder and CEO of Steno, a tech-enabled provider of legal support and court reporting services.

Nov 15, 2024 9:40 AM CST

Meet the sheriffs who believe they are ‘The Highest Law in the Land’

In The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, lawyer and journalist Jessica Pishko takes a deep dive into the history of this position in American life and at a far-right movement hoping to co-opt it.

Oct 24, 2024 1:30 PM CDT

‘The Calculator Mistake’: Denial, hostility won’t help lawyers deal with emergence of AI

My high school trigonometry teacher was, by his own admission, “old school.” He didn’t allow us to use calculators. Ever. Instead, all decimals had to be divided by hand, all formulas known by memory, and all square roots worked out on paper. We were unlikely to walk around with calculators when we got older, he explained, and so we had to be able to work things out with only a pencil and our brain.

Oct 23, 2024 2:00 PM CDT

This law school is among the 1% that allow use of AI to write admissions essays

Can would-be law students use generative artificial intelligence programs, such as ChatGPT, to write admissions essays? Fifty-four percent of surveyed law schools have no official policy on the issue, according to a survey by test prep company Kaplan.

Oct 9, 2024 2:47 PM CDT

Will generative AI ever fix its hallucination problem?

A misplaced reliance on generative AI for research can be like overtrusting your robocar’s driving skills, resulting in real or metaphorical crashes.

Oct 1, 2024 2:30 AM CDT

Guard against poor legal research with these 3 writing practices

“Not long ago, the partners at a law firm told me of an embarrassingly disastrous trial. … They wanted to know whether I knew of ways to prevent this type of problem. The answer is a qualified yes: While there are no panaceas, certain protocols can minimize the risks of suboptimal research. Here are the three crucial points.”

Oct 1, 2024 2:10 AM CDT

The Supreme Court is a liberal body—when it comes to legal writing

Legal writing professor Jill Barton spent five years analyzing more than 10,000 pages of SCOTUS opinions to produce The Supreme Guide to Writing. Her biggest takeaway? The justices are not a conservative bunch when it comes to writing style.

Sep 25, 2024 8:48 AM CDT

Multitalented lawyer turns passion for Hawaiian history into new film

By day, Lance Collins is a lawyer. By night, (and sometimes day) he’s also a filmmaker, book editor and music producer. Now, he can add another title to his eclectic resumé: screenwriter for a feature-length film now playing on a streaming service near you. “When it comes to my time,” Collins says, “every minute is accounted for.”

Sep 24, 2024 8:48 AM CDT

9 changes to the Chicago Manual of Style, and why they matter

The Chicago Manual of Style’s rules are meant not only for those of us who write and edit for a living but for anyone who writes and edits, which is to say everyone.

Sep 20, 2024 9:00 AM CDT