Imagine an enemy posse rushing towards you. They are dressed in bizarre and elaborate costumes, including papier mache horns, cardboard armour and joke-shop Dracula fangs.…
Intensifiers are adverbs intended to strengthen adjectives. For example, writing ‘very unfair’ instead of ‘unfair’ should suggest that whatever you are referring to is more…
Most of us have words and phrases that we overuse. For example, I have a tendency to start sentences with ‘clearly’ when writing submissions: as…
Should you prepare a list of questions? This is a question on which reasonable people disagree. The argument is basically this. Those against say a…
There is a tendency for advocates, consciously or subconsciously, to divide documents and authorities between ‘mine’ and ‘theirs’. ‘My’ documents are those that come from…
Quite often schedules of loss will leave off figures for some types of damage and replace them with words like ‘in the tribunal’s discretion’ or…
You will often hear people in tribunal saying ‘That begs the question’. Almost all of them are misusing the phrase. ‘Begging the question’ is a…
The last post advised against using exclamation marks in legal writing. A similar rule applies when speaking. If a transcript of what you say would…
It is often useful to number issues or similar topics. It provides structure and organisation. For example, in a written submission it is common to…
Mark Bennett, a Texan criminal defence attorney, practices a very different sort of law to us. In fact, we’re probably as far apart as it’s…