What is Legal Writing?

Table of Contents:

• What Do You Mean By Legal Writing?
• How To Start Legal Writing?
• How To Improve Legal Writing Skills?
• Conclusion
• Bonus Points

Have you ever wondered what goes into crafting legal documents like contracts, briefs, or pleadings? If you are planning to start a career in Law, then you will need to familiarize yourself with legal writing. This blog aims to help you understand Legal Writing, and offer ways to improve your Legal Writing Skills with minimal time and money. 

What do you Mean by Legal Writing?

Legal writing is the process of crafting legal documents such as contracts, briefs, memorandums, and legal motions. While it is not necessary to be a good writer in the classical sense to be good at writing legal documents, it is still essential to have foundational linguistic, grammatical and vocabulary skills to master Legal Writing. 

Whether you are a law student, legal professional, paralegal, legal researcher, or anyone planning to work in the legal field, developing knowledge and skills in legal writing is non-negotiable.

How to Start Legal Writing?

As a fresher, if you are wondering where to start legal writing, your best course of action is to explore some legal writing courses. You can learn the basics for free on UniAthena with this Basics of Legal Writing course. In just 4-6 hours you will learn the different types of legal writing, understand the modern practices, and learn how technology and globalization affect legal writing.

Apart from that you can also explore this Basics of Legal Drafting course and learn the fundamentals, key techniques, and guidelines in drafting legal documents. This course will especially help you get familiar with technical terms, words, and phrases used in legal writing.

And finally, if you are looking for a legal writing course online that focuses solely on legal articles, you can explore the Basics of Legal Articles course. This legal writing training course is not just for beginners, law students, and aspiring lawyers, but also legal researchers, paralegals, and scholars. You will learn to choose the right and relevant legal topics, structure articles correctly, and comply with ethical standards.

How to Improve Legal Writing Skills?

Apart from joining a legal writing class online, you can follow these tips to improve your legal writing skills:

• Read Legal Writing Online Guides: Make a habit of reading legal guides and documents to gain a better understanding how legal writing varies from other written forms, and to find valuable legal knowledge.
• Understand Who you are Writing For: You must tailor your writing style, vocabulary and tone to the nature of the legal document you are drafting. 
• Conduct Research: Having knowledge of the relevant laws and statutes is important. So before writing, make sure you do your background research on the document you will be writing, including its function and its goal.
• Maintain a Professional Tone: Legal writing is a technical kind of writing, meaning you will need to keep your tone professional. You can practise writing in a professional tone to get a better understanding of it.
• Keep your Writing Concise: To write like a professional, you need to keep your legal writing to the point. Avoid filler words and be concise.
• Edit and Proofread your Document: As a beginner, you can get a senior professional to proofread for you, so you can edit according to the feedback you receive.

Conclusion

If you are planning to work in a legal profession, you will need to learn to write legal documents. Legal writing, being a technical style of writing, has its own set of rules. Understanding these rules can help you become a better legal writer.

Learn how to improve legal writing skills with UniAthena’s free learning courses. You can also get certifications from these courses and add them to your resume. Explore the courses now!

Bonus Points:

• To become a good legal writer you must become a better researcher. Start reading online resources, legal news, journal articles, case studies, and more.
• Remember these two elements in your legal writing: Clarity and conciseness. They will make your writing better.