Course Highlights
This plain language writing workshop for lawyers will:
- Make the case for plain English in legal writing and address the professional habits and training that push lawyers toward complexity.
- Examine the word-level choices that bloat legal documents without adding meaning or protection.
- Address hidden verbs and nominalization, the single most common source of weak, sluggish prose in legal writing.
- Cover the sentence construction errors that create ambiguity, slow readers down, and occasionally cost clients money.
- Identify the language distractions that undermine a legal document’s authority, including noun chains, multiple negatives, and weak qualifiers.
- Establish why punctuation matters more in legal writing than in any other professional context and give writers a practical standard for getting it right.
Program Overview
Lawyers learn to write from other lawyers. That is most of the problem. Legal writing carries conventions that developed over centuries, many of which served a genuine purpose in an era of hand-copied manuscripts and untested legal concepts, and most of which no longer serve any purpose at all except to signal membership in a professional tradition. The result is a recognizable style: long sentences built around nominalized verbs, redundant doublets carried forward from when English and Latin had to cover the same ground simultaneously, passive constructions that obscure agency, and a general preference for complexity that mistakes length for rigor and obscurity for precision.
Judges notice. Clients notice. And the legal profession has spent decades producing scholarship, style guides, and court rules that make the same argument: plain English serves the law better than legal English does. Clarity is not the enemy of precision. Obscurity is.
This half-day workshop makes that case and then prepares participants to act on it. The session opens by examining why lawyers write the way they do and what it costs them, then moves through the specific writing habits that create the most damage: buried verbs, poor sentence construction, distracting word choices, and punctuation errors that can change the meaning of a document entirely. Participants will work with their own documents and with examples drawn from legal contexts throughout the session, applying plain English principles to prose they will recognize.
The workshop does not ask lawyers to abandon precision. It asks them to stop confusing complexity with precision and to develop the habits that produce writing that is both legally sound and genuinely clear.
The following outline highlights some of the course’s learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).
Program Objectives
At the program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:
- Explain why legal writing defaults to complexity and identify the professional pressures that reinforce that default.
- Apply concrete techniques for eliminating unnecessary words and tightening dense legal text.
- Replace hidden verbs and nominalized constructions with direct, forceful alternatives.
- Identify and correct the sentence construction errors that most often create ambiguity in legal documents.
- Recognize and remove the language choices that undermine a document’s authority and clarity.
- Apply correct punctuation in legal writing, with particular attention to the constructions where a single error changes meaning.
Workshop Modules
Making the Case: Why Plain English for Lawyers
The session opens with a direct examination of why legal writing looks the way it does and why that matters. The group will work through the historical and professional forces that push lawyers toward complexity: the training environment, the instinct to hedge, the habit of borrowing language from precedent without questioning whether it still serves the document, and the belief, rarely examined, that more words mean more protection. Participants will also examine the costs of that complexity, including the research on how judges respond to dense prose, what clients understand and do not understand from the documents they sign, and the growing body of court rules and judicial guidance that explicitly call for plain language. The workshop treats this opening discussion not as a preamble but as the argument the rest of the session builds on. Writers who understand why they write the way they do change their habits more reliably than writers who simply receive a list of corrections.
Suspend the Surplus: Less Is More
Legal documents accumulate words the way houses accumulate furniture, and for similar reasons: each addition felt justified at the time, and no one ever goes back to ask whether it is still earning its place. This part of the workshop addresses the specific habits that inflate legal prose without strengthening it, including redundant doublets such as “null and void” and “terms and conditions,” throat-clearing preambles that delay the substance of a sentence, prepositional phrases that replace simpler constructions, and the general instinct to add qualifications until a sentence has hedged itself into incoherence. The group will apply the Word Audit tool to sample legal texts and practice cutting surplus language without losing accuracy or legal effect. Participants will examine before-and-after examples and revise their own documents, testing how much a passage can lose before it starts to lose meaning.
All About the Base: Verbs Are Not Created Equal
Nominalization, converting a strong verb into a noun and then building a sentence around it, is the most common and most costly writing habit in the legal profession. “Make a determination” when the writer means “determine.” “Reach a conclusion” when the writer means “conclude.” “Provide an explanation” when the writer means “explain.” Each conversion drains energy from the sentence, adds words, and distances the reader from the action. This discussion examines nominalization directly: what it is, why legal writers default to it, and how to identify and reverse it. The group will work through the Sentence Ladder tool to rebuild flat, nominalized sentences into direct ones and practice applying that process to passages drawn from real legal documents. Participants will also examine how active voice and strong base verbs work together to produce prose that moves, persuades, and holds a reader’s attention rather than exhausting it.
Construction Crimes: Getting Sentences in Order
A misplaced modifier, a dangling clause, an antecedent that could refer to either of two nouns, a sentence that builds toward its main point through four lines of subordinate clauses — these are not stylistic preferences. In legal writing, they create ambiguity, invite dispute, and occasionally produce outcomes no one intended. This part of the session examines the sentence construction errors that appear most consistently in legal documents and gives participants a practical framework for catching and correcting them. The group will work through how to identify the subject and main verb of a sentence and get them as close together as possible, how to handle dependent clauses without losing the reader, and how to test a sentence for unintended readings before it leaves the document. Participants will revise passages that contain genuine construction errors and practice applying the principles to their own drafts.
Distraction Action: Avoiding Language Lures
Some words and constructions in legal writing do not obscure meaning by accident. They do it by instinct, by habit, and occasionally by design. This discussion addresses the language choices that distract, dilute, or mislead rather than inform: noun chains that stack modifier on modifier until the governing noun disappears, multiple negatives that require the reader to invert the sentence mentally before understanding it, weak qualifiers that soften a statement past the point of usefulness, and the Latin and archaic English phrases that signal tradition without adding precision. The group will work through each category with examples from legal documents and apply the Clarity Stand tool to evaluate passages against a plain English standard. Participants will practice replacing distracting constructions with direct ones and examine how those replacements affect the legal meaning, if at all, of the surrounding text.
Points of Punctuation: That Comma Costs a Million Dollars
The title of this module references a real phenomenon. Courts interpret punctuation. Contracts turn on it. A comma in the wrong place, or absent from the right one, changes the scope of a clause, the reach of a modifier, or the meaning of an enumerated list. This closing discussion takes legal punctuation seriously as a substantive writing skill rather than a mechanical afterthought. The group will work through the punctuation decisions that create the most legal risk: the serial comma in lists, the placement of commas in restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, the use of semicolons in complex enumerations, and the treatment of parenthetical expressions in formal legal prose. Participants will examine real cases in which punctuation affected legal interpretation and practice applying the correct standard to their own documents. The session closes with a review pass that puts all of the day’s principles into a single, fast editing process participants can apply to any document before it goes out.
Target Audience
This workshop is designed for groups that want to:
- Produce legal documents that judges, clients, and colleagues can read and understand without a second pass.
- Eliminate the writing habits that inflate legal prose without adding legal protection or precision.
- Build a shared plain English standard across a legal team, office, or department.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is this workshop designed for?
This workshop suits lawyers, paralegals, legal analysts, and other legal professionals who draft, review, or edit legal documents as a regular part of their work. It fits attorneys at any stage of their career, including new associates building foundational habits and experienced practitioners who want to sharpen prose that has calcified over years of borrowing from precedent.
Does plain English compromise legal precision?
No, and the workshop addresses this directly in the opening discussion. Plain English does not mean simple English or imprecise English. It means language that communicates its legal meaning as clearly and directly as possible to the reader who needs to act on it. The most precise legal document in the world fails if the person who needs to understand it cannot. The workshop makes the case that clarity and legal precision reinforce each other rather than competing, and participants work through examples that demonstrate that argument in practice.
Will participants work on their own documents?
Yes. We encourage participants to bring documents they currently produce so the revision exercises connect directly to their real work. Where clients share materials in advance, we build the practice exercises around those documents. That conversation happens before the session.
Does the workshop cover legal-specific writing conventions?
Yes. The examples, exercises, and discussion throughout the session draw from legal contexts, including contracts, briefs, opinions, correspondence, and other documents the group produces regularly. This is not a general business writing course adapted for lawyers. The workshop addresses the specific habits, pressures, and document types that define legal writing.
Do you offer a full-day version of this program?
Yes. We expand this workshop to a full day for teams that want deeper practice time or additional focus on specific document types such as contracts, briefs, or client correspondence.
Do you offer a virtual version of this program?
Yes. We deliver a virtual version of this program in a multi-segment format. Contact us to discuss options.