Judge Orders Lawyers to Stop Using Capitalization ‘With Abandon’
A federal bankruptcy judge is fed up with lawyers who use superfluous words and too much capitalization, and he has directed them to stop it.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel of Minnesota took a stand against legalese in new guidelines (PDF) for lawyers preparing proposed orders in his court, Legal Blog Watch reports, citing a story by Lawyerist.
Kressel says lawyers should eliminate superfluous words such as “hereby,” “herein” and “heretofore entered in this case.” The phrases “serve no purpose other than to make the document sound more legal, which is exactly the opposite of the goal that I am trying to accomplish,” he writes. “Compare the meaning of ‘Now, therefore, it may be and is hereby ordered that’ with ‘It is ordered.’ ”
Kressel also observes that “lawyers love to capitalize words. Pleadings, including proposed orders, are commonly full of words that are capitalized, not quite randomly, but certainly with great abandon. Please limit the use of capitalization to proper names. For example, do not capitalize court, motion, movant, debtor, trustee, order, affidavit, stipulation, mortgage, lease or any of the other numerous words that are commonly capitalized.”
Kressel also says lawyers need to keep their plurals and possessives “straight and consistent,” need to watch verb tense, and need to use the possessive “its” and the contraction “it’s” correctly.
Don’t use “and/or,” he counsels. But do use articles such as “the,” “a,” and “an” as appropriate. Refer to “the debtor,” rather than “debtor,” for example.
“Write the way you would speak,” he says.
