Helpful consolidation notes for the Legal Writing Module on the LPC.
Helps you to save time to see what the examiner is looking for in the mock and real exams.
Particularly helpful for Uni of Law students but other law students may find this guide helpful.
1. Select the appropriate form of written communication to suit the purpose of your
communication and the needs of the recipient
2. Write in a style and tone appropriate for the recipient and the purpose of your
communication
3. Communicate complex concepts and principles in a clear and structured manner
4. Critically evaluate the quality of written material
For the first outcome, if you are writing a formal letter to the court for example, it would not be
appropriate to include the content of that in an email instead of a letter. However, when you are
writing to a colleague, an email might be perfectly appropriate. So by the end of this course, what
you should be able to do is select the best method of communicating with that recipient.
The second outcome there, write in a style and tone appropriate for the recipient and the purpose
of your communication. This is something which is quite tricky and often it is quite hard to get right.
But if you are writing to a client and say you are writing a letter of advice, what your client does not
want is the inclusion of a lot of statutory references, case law and legal jargon. They want to know
how the law applies to the facts of their situation. But the legal jargon is something which they won’t
appreciate you including, because it doesn’t aid their understanding in any way, it just tells them
where the information has come from and that is something that you need to know but the client
really doesn’t need to know. And it makes the letter read more easily if you don’t include such legal
jargon.
However, if you are writing to a colleague, then you are going to need to include statutory
references, case law and legal jargon, because they will understand it, they have been trained in
that, of course they will understand it, and it may be necessary to include all of that to discuss the
basis of your client’s case. This is something that students often get wrong in assessments. Some
students will include far too much statutory references when they are writing to a client, so make
sure you don’t fall into this trap.
The third outcome there, communicate complex concepts and principles in a clear and structured
manner. This is a big part of your job as a solicitor. You have been trained in the law, so you
understand these complex concepts. Clients don’t, just because that is not the training they have
received, and your job is to make it easier for them to understand and most of the time you are
going to be advising them by letter. So you need to develop the skill of legal writing so that your
advice to your clients is clear, you write it in a structured way so it is easier to understand, and
everybody knows and understands exactly what you are saying.
The fourth there, critically evaluate the quality of written material. This is important for reviewing
your own work. You need to be able to look at a letter you have written and assess it. Does it achieve
what you wanted? Is it clear? Does it include everything that should be included? And also, often in
the office you will be supervising work of other people and you need to be able to read their letters
and work out whether they are appropriate, whether something has been missed out, or whether
something needs taking out. So it is important to be able to be critical of your own work. That
doesn’t necessarily mean negative; there will be things that you spot which are good things as well.
, But actually it is quite important at this stage to start doing that, because when you have completed
your assessment, you need to be able read through it and work out whether it meets the standard.
So, why is good writing important?
Obviously, you might spend a lot of time drafting as well. But you are going to be writing to clients,
you are going to be writing to colleagues, you may be writing to solicitors acting for the other party,
you may be writing to the court or to barristers if you go into litigation.
So it is important that it is something you can do well, because you will spend a lot of your working
time doing it.
If you write well, it aids clarity, so it means that someone can understand the advice you are giving
them for example, people know exactly what you are saying, and that links on really to the third
bullet point there.
Mistakes in accuracies can cause ambiguity. But when you are reading something someone else has
written, you may not realise it is ambiguous, you could read it and think you understand it perfectly
because you have interpreted it in a way that it different from what the writer intended. So the
more precise you can be as a writer, the better it is for the recipient. What you are trying to
communicate will be effectively communicated if you write well.
The last bullet point there, if writing is not your strong point, this is an unfortunate truth really, but
mistakes in accuracies and grammar and punctuation can lead the recipient to question the accuracy
of the legal content. If someone reads your letter and thinks well, they have missed this out, that
have missed that out, they don’t know where to put an apostrophe, they could start thinking what is
the overall ability of this solicitor?
And so it is important that you try as hard as you can to write good letters so that the clients, if they
are judging you on the quality of your writing, are not put off by mistakes that they find.
So, I have put up here five sentences and we are going to have a look at why they are ambiguous and
how we could change them to make them clearer. All of them could be made clearer by either re-
drafting or by putting in an apostrophe or a comma.
1. I am prepared to give the sum of £1 million to you and your husband.
You may already have spotted what the problem is there. Are there two lots of £1 million or
just one? So the person who is being addressed there, you, will they receive £1 million and
their husband will receive £1 million, or will they have to share it between them? And if they
are going to share it, is it in equal shares? It is not clear at the moment and that could be
disastrous if that was in a contract. Ok, this particular sentence is not something you would
write in a contract, but this type of mistake is going to be really disastrous if it is written into
a contract.
2. Two cars were reported stolen by the police today.
You may think on first reading that you understand that perfectly. Did the police report that
the cars were stolen? Or did somebody report that the police had stolen the cars? As it
stands, either interpretation could be correct. Now you may be aided by the context there, it
may be perfectly clear which of those two scenarios you are talking about, judging by what is
said before and what is said afterwards. But it is not great to have to look at the rest of a text
to work out exactly what a sentence means. The meaning needs to be clear from the
sentence itself.
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