Find several resources for writing better legal documents on this much-linked blog:
"Legal language is used to record and explain the most important events in people’s lives — should it not be comprehensible?
"Modernizing the archaic style you learned by rote is easy and with a little practice becomes habit.
"Legal writing should be well organized (simple) and use everyday words (plain). This is easy to learn if you have the desire. So go for it."
BTW, blogger Cheryl Stephens "[I]s interested in how people communicate and relate to one another. I am a mentor, a muse, a friend, a teacher, and a retired consultant and lawyer."
Back in 1982, I think it was, my sister got her Masters in Studies of Law degree from Yale University. She was one of three that day. There were probably close to 75 JD’s and sundry other legal degrees more advanced conferred, but the Dean of the College of Law made a comment that stuck with me. He said that of all the degrees that they awarded, the one that he felt was the most influential was the one my sister had achieved. Why? Because she and her colleagues were the ones who would read and explain the workings of the legal system to the public in plain everyday language.
Now-to me, anyway-it is doggone sad that a major Ivy League, no less, school has to award a MASTERS degree so that people can understand the laws by which they are expected to govern their lives. I find that appalling. Lawyers like to think that they are “tying up loose ends” and “eliminating loopholes” when all they are really doing is cramming more verbiage into a document until you can’t possibly understand the darn thing without a juris doctor. Lord, have mercy.
For a people who started out with Ten Commandments-we sure have written ourselves into a lot of Annotated Code that basically says the same thing. Interesting thing about people-we keep explaining ourselves and not understanding a doggone thing!