Garner's Guide to Making Briefs More Persuasive: Tip 1 - Know Thy Reader

During this difficult time when so many of us are working away from the office, it seems like a good time to methodically go through a valuable reference for attorneys - Bryan A. Garner's The Winning Brief: 100 Tips for Persuasive Briefing in Trial and Appellate Courts. A solid command of the advice in this book can allow a paralegal to go beyond simply confirming the accuracy of legal citations in a memorandum of law, and improve the overall coherence and persuasiveness of the brief. Hopefully this crisis will have ended before I go through all 100 tips!

Garner's first tip is simple: Know thy reader. This may appear to be a bit insubstantial and obvious, but a read through the chapter on this tip helps flesh out what Garner is getting at. He uses these specific points to illustrate what he means:

1. Judge read briefs quickly - try to invade their though processes.

2. The reader of a legal brief will usually be busy; looking for something useful; and skeptical of your assertions.

3. If the details aren't right, a reader will assume that the larger points will probably not be right.

4. Distill your message on the first page.

5. Avoid needless formality.

6. Remember the maxim of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, "No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence."

7. Chief Justice Joe R. Greenhill of the Texas Supreme Court recommends not referring to statutes simply by a section number - judges may not always understand language that is too technical.

8. Garner notes that Justice Clarence Thomas told him in an interview, that he's more likely to take the time to read a 20 page brief than a 50 page brief.

Bloomberg's Brief Analyzer

Don't miss that your Bloomberg Law account includes a Brief Analyzer. You can upload a text searchable PDF of a brief to the Analyzer and it will assist you with the following tasks:

1. Review the cases and statutes cited in the brief.

You'll be able to download the cited cases with less trouble than listing the cases one by one in Lexis Get & Print.

2. Browse through the brief by clicking on sections of the table of contents displayed on the left of the screen.

3. Bloomberg will suggest content to add for the arguments made in the brief. For example, in the sample brief shown below the Analyzer suggests a cite to a case not cited in the original version of the brief and lists four reasons why it should be included.

The Analyzer will note when a suggested citation cites to the same cases as a section of your brief; when it includes similar language; and when it is from the same court.

4. Easily locate additional citations for the points made in the section by running a keyword search based on the content of that section. So, in this example we search for cases that discuss ballot counting that address the issue when a plaintiff has standing.

Bankers Box Ban?

It sounds crazy, but my two most recent visits to Fedex shipping centers have left me with the impression that a ban on bankers boxes may be imposed. First, a Fedex agent insisted on repacking documents from my bankers box in Fedex boxes, and warned these boxes would no longer be accepted. Tonight at the same location I was told that they are starting to enforce a rule against boxes with openings on the side that function as handles. She accepted the box anyway but I wonder what will happen the next time I need to hustle something over at the last minute. Fedex’s packing guidelines, https://www.fedex.com/downloads/shared/packagingtips/howtopack.pdf , specify that bankers boxes can’t weight more than 30 pounds and that the box should be secured with 2 inch packing tape placed on in a tic-tac-toe pattern. However it doesn’t appear to restrict the use of bankers boxes with grip gals, something nearly all have.