At Cockle Legal Briefs, we work with quite a few non-lawyers who are figuring out how to write a legal brief for the U.S. Supreme Court. Occasionally our conversations with our pro se customers move beyond the necessary formatting and content requirements for a Supreme Court brief, and into more basic questions of legal writing. Over time, we have come up with some general legal writing tips. I have previously posted tips, here, here, and here , and today I offer other tips, with more to come in later posts.
How To Write A Legal Brief: Cut. Wait. And Then Cut Some More.
I sometimes wonder if the size limits for appellate legal briefs are not so much about reducing the total pages for the court to review, but more to help drafters write stronger briefs. The body of law is a complex, multi-layered balancing of interests, and a dedicated researcher could spend days and weeks uncovering different facets of even the most straightforward legal concept. And certainly, a strong research effort is essential for compiling a persuasive legal brief. But in the end, the drafter must organize and put words to the various theoretical strains, and then type up a compelling legal argument.
A non-lawyer learning how to write a legal brief might simply dump all of the research onto the page, hoping that the judge will be able to pick out the convincing elements. But this approach does not lead to effective written advocacy.
Cut. Wait. And then cut some more.
Instead, after writing the first draft, the non-lawyer should carefully review the document, and cut anything that does not offer anything more than casual support for the main argument. If you describe two similar, precedential cases, each with its own paragraph, find a way to combine them into one paragraph. If you suspect that some procedural hiccup in the lower court might have generally prejudiced your case, but you don’t have a very effective way of tying that to your legal argument, you should probably just leave that issue out of your brief. If you take five paragraphs to describe how the errors below have impacted your life, remember that the court’s main interest is in the law, not your loss, and cut it down to one very compelling, emotional paragraph.
When I write a brief, I finish the draft, make a few edits, and then set it aside. A day or two later, I pick it up, and make more cuts. And I might do that a few more times. In the end, when I know that I have a document that is lean and pithy, I feel confident that I have written an effective legal brief.
How To Write A Legal Brief: Find A Citation Style, And Stick With It
The U.S. Supreme Court does not require a standard legal citation form. And legal professionals use many different styles, depending on preference. But for the non-lawyer who wants to know how to write a legal brief, the different styles can seem archaic, or even absurd.
But legal citation is like any other system: once you pick up the basic theory, it gets pretty easy after that. With just a quick search, I found three online sources that offer citation how-tos for free, here, here, and here.
Some of the briefs we see from non-lawyers will use different citation forms throughout the brief, even sometimes referring to the same legal authority using different methods in different sections of the brief. I suspect this often happens when the drafter has cut-and-pasted items from other sources—which is a completely legitimate method, often used by lawyers—but they don’t adjust the citation format from the other material to match the citations in the brief. Taking the time to make sure that your citation style is uniform throughout the document will go a long way towards giving your brief a polished, persuasive look.
You can find more great tips for writing a winning brief in our white paper, “How to Write a Winning Appellate Brief.”