Poor legal writing often isn’t a failure of knowledge, but a failure of nerve. It’s anxiety dressed up as thoroughness. The lawyer more or less knows the point, but it looks exposed on the page and easy to test or attack. So the writer starts stacking sandbags around it, adding background, caveats, and citations until the draft feels safer, even as it becomes harder to read.
May 5, 2026 1:08 PM CDT
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