Recently I was in a meeting with a group of attorneys reviewing two proposed addenda to a contract. One was very detailed – contained definitions, covered all possible contingencies and outcomes. Its sheer length and complexity made it more difficult to follow. The second was much shorter thus easier to understand and addressed only the …
Legal Style Guides
To badly hijack a quote from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, good legal writing style, like pornography, is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Attorneys start developing a legal writing style in law school. For most of us, it is awkward at first. Remember IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion)? Not to …
Coming Soon to a Computer Near You
With Monday’s launch of WestlawNext, Thomson Reuters’s new legal research platform, and recent announcements from Fastcase and LexisNexis about new products, it’s time to step back and see what really is changing. The New York Times and the latest ABA Journal both preview some of the changes, which we also summarize below. While competition for …
Chewing on Our Legal News
We asked, you answered. Each Wednesday, the MSBA sends out its Legal News Digest (LND), which collects and highlights legal news from the past week, including Minnesota and national news as well as news about the legal profession. More recently, we added select blog posts from local and national legal bloggers. After launching the new …
Don’t Right Click This Post
The Minnesota Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility has been busy with its opinions in the last year, amending two prior opinions, proposing and approving two new opinions, and proposing a third new opinion that is currently open for comment. The two relatively new opinions cover the use of the term “& Associates” in a firm’s …