Law is a high stress field. Lawyers finish school and descend into a meatgrinder in legal practice. The fast pace, high stakes, and need for perfection can overwhelm even the most skilled attorney. When clients are depending on you, every word counts. So how can a legal writer balance their responsibilities and their basic wellbeing? Attorney, author, and blogger Claire E. Parsons has faced these challenges head on, and has advice for other lawyers about their writing and their wellness.
What is your role and how did you get to where you are today?
I feel fortunate to have multiple roles at this stage of my career. I am as surprised by this as I am pleased about it. For my law practice, I am Of Counsel at Bricker Graydon in the Cincinnati area. I have been practicing for 15 years in the areas of school law, employment law, and litigation. I started in a smaller insurance defense firm with a strong focus on local government work. Though I started in civil litigation, I soon was asked to learn special education to meet client needs. I did that and quickly became known for my work and then moved more into general school law. I am fairly new at my current firm but I was drawn to the firm’s strong public sector and school law presence.
Coincidentally, my role at my current firm emerged in part from my other life. In addition to practicing law, I am a mindfulness and compassion teacher, founder of the Brilliant Legal Mind blog, speaker, and book author. I’ve struggled with anxiety, perfectionism, overthinking and depression for much of my life. After I recovered from postpartum depression during my first pregnancy, I started meditating and it made a huge difference. About five years ago, I started speaking and writing on the topic, using social media to share my thoughts and stories, and ultimately began writing longer form content. During this progression, I built up my network, which included becoming acquainted with a partner at my current firm, and the relationship grew over time. It goes to show you that following your dreams can also be good for your career.
Why is good writing important to being a good lawyer?
Writing is foundational to many essential job functions for lawyers. Many people define “legal writing” to refer to client letters, memos, and briefs. I define it far more broadly. In addition to serving client needs, lawyers also must market their services, build relationships with clients, and cultivate a strong network. Lawyers need strong writing skills to efficiently and clearly communicate with and on behalf of clients. They also need these skills to effectively communicate for themselves and their firms or organizations.
As an introvert, I used to worry that I could never bring in business or network effectively because I felt awkward at big events and hated small talk. Writing helped me learn to network and develop business my way. I started writing articles in trade magazines, then blog posts, and then LinkedIn posts. This helped me demonstrate my legal knowledge and my personality, and my network and confidence quickly grew. For this reason, good writing is an essential skill that can be leveraged in countless ways to serve the needs of clients and attorneys alike.
What is the most frustrating part about becoming a good legal writer? How do you overcome it?
I am an intensely verbal communicator and have been drawn to words since I was a kid. My writing skills have been above average since I was young. I also studied philosophy in college and structure in written work comes innately to me. When I started practicing in litigation, I had no trouble with analysis or constructing a logical argument. The hardest part for me was dealing with things like self-doubt about my arguments, paralysis by analysis, and procrastination caused by perfectionism.
Of course, years of practice helped me build some confidence in my skills, but that was not enough to calm my doubt and anxiety. Meditation was the thing that changed this habit for me. Contrary to what many people assume, the practice didn’t make me instantly calm. Rather, it helped me become more curious about my patterns of mind and self-compassionate towards my struggles. In addition, meditation allowed me mental space to accommodate all my copious thoughts.
Over time, I began to see that some of my excessive thoughts were ideas for writing. This is when I started writing on LinkedIn and then blogging. All that practice helped me realize my voice mattered and could influence others. It also helped me learn to trust myself more and collaborate in all of my writing, including at work.
What unique insights do great writers have about how legal work is done? About persuasion? About storytelling?
Many lawyers are told in law school that emotions don’t matter or shouldn’t matter when it comes to legal issues. I think professors offer this instruction to help lawyers learn to avoid letting their emotions dictate their advice. Even so, this idea can cause many of us, myself included, to adopt a delusion that emotions and the law are separate. They aren’t.
As a mindfulness teacher, I teach lawyers to find healthy ways to process emotions so that they don’t unwittingly affect a lawyer’s work. That is because my work as a lawyer tells me that emotions affect everything we do. Emotions affect us in doing the work, they affect clients as they navigate disputes, and they affect judges and decision-makers.
Good lawyers know how to appeal to logic and emotion in their writing. First, this means showing some concern for the experience of the reader in your work. Second, it requires the skillful use of emotion in writing, including with stories, word choice, and analogies. Of course, the emotional content and utility will vary from text to text, but understanding how to modulate and balance these components is part of great legal writing.
How can legal writers improve their ability to accept and incorporate editing feedback?
Because I enjoy writing so much, friends and colleagues often ask me to review their work. As someone who writes, including about my personal life, I know that this shows a great deal of trust. Even when we write about legal matters, writing is an intimate act. Getting feedback from others can be scary and the reality is that some people aren’t skilled at giving feedback. My first tip, then, is to accept that you might have feelings about getting feedback. It’s okay to feel vulnerable about it and to feel protective of your work.
Where possible, though, I encourage you to open your mind, too. Though they can be scary, collaboration and feedback lead to more refined written work. They can also help you build skills because you will get to see new ways of articulating fact patterns, structuring arguments, or analyzing issues.
For a long time, my overthinking felt like a liability to me, but I see it now as a blessing because it forced me to get feedback on my writing. Early in my law practice and history as a writer, I felt compelled to publish my thoughts. My voice was not well developed at the time, but I felt an urge to publish to let some thoughts go. This felt a bit scary, but the feedback and community helped me learn a lot and develop my style rapidly. Though trusting others with your work can be scary, I think it is worth it.
What advice would you give to legal professionals who are just starting out in the legal world?
I think new lawyers need encouragement and support more than advice. Besides, my biggest advice is to go and explore and not to be afraid of following weird paths and interests. This advice is somewhat unhelpful and maybe even frustrating because it’s inherently undefined and incredibly scary. For this reason, I call it encouragement and I offer support.
I followed an admittedly strange path. I started teaching mindfulness seemingly out of the blue and writing about topics that weren’t directly related to my law practice. Though this didn’t seem to make sense at first, it has been a wonderful complement to my law practice and it lights me up. Now I enjoy the privilege of helping people both in and outside of my law practice and it means the world to me.
In addition, though I didn’t pursue teaching mindfulness with the intention of supporting my law practice, it has in so many ways. Having outside interests has put me into contact with a wider range of people and that is always beneficial for lawyers. It also energizes me and helps me stay steady when my law practice is challenging.
I encourage anyone reading this to be willing to follow a strange path. Pursue what matters to you in your practice and outside of it. Give the voice of intuition a listen every now and then, and build in time to play as much as you can. If you need any support in doing this, reach out to me because I am happy to talk.
Where do you look outside of law for advice or guidance about writing? How do you determine what advice will apply or translate well?
I am glad you asked this question because I never gained much from reading books on legal writing. I have learned far more about writing, including legal writing, from reading good books. Read novels and pay attention to the word choices that move you. Read nonfiction and notice how the structure of the book supports or hinders the points made. Read self-help or instructional books and notice if you are able to follow along or if there are logical gaps or fallacies. In short, read what you otherwise want to read but savor the writing as you do. If you really want instruction on good writing and also living a good life, you should read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
What is your writing process when you must write to length and deadline?
My writing process usually starts in my head. I brainstorm, research and review if needed, jot down notes, and mentally gather all the points I plan to make. I rarely need to create a formal outline when I write because structure comes naturally. If aspects of an article or brief are not clear, I sometimes piece them together in a rough set of handwritten notes. More often than not, though, I start drafting each individual chunk and piece them together later when they make more sense to me.
When I have a rough outline, I start what I call the “mind dump” phase. This is as elegant as it sounds. I quickly type and mentally download my thoughts into a document. If it is a lengthy brief, I will go piece by piece through arguments or sections. If it is something like a letter or article, I type everything in a block and let the words flow. During this phase, I do not edit or review or even think all that much.
Ideally, my next step is to let the draft rest for a few hours—a day or more if possible. This break helps me avoid intermingling the writing and editing phases. It also lets the mental dust settle so that I am clear when I start editing. Editing is where I restructure and check logical flow, if needed, and frequently remove filler language and improve word choice.
Wherever possible, I read my writing aloud because I am more likely to hear a problem with writing than see it. I have learned that if writing doesn’t sound good, it isn’t good and needs some attention. Finally, if I have time to get input from my client, colleagues, or skilled support staff, I seek it out because it always makes the work better.
How do you find the time and motivation to do extra writing when you write so much already in your legal practice?
At this point, I consider all of my extra writing a mental health practice. I think too much, and writing helps me let go of the extra thoughts. In this way, I don’t feel like I have to make time to write. Instead, I feel the urge to write and have to act on it, or I feel uncomfortable. Another motivator for me is that most of my extra writing relates to mindfulness and mental health topics. If I can write something—even a basic post sharing a resource—and it helps someone, it’s inherently rewarding to be able to do that.
From a time management standpoint, though, I can say that consistent writing makes the job much faster. Early in my writing history, it would take me longer to generate ideas and turn them into finished works. That time reduced considerably when I developed a reliable process and learned to trust myself. I don’t find that writing itself takes lots of time anymore, but hand-wringing, anxiety, and doubt used to suck hours of my life away.
There are certainly times when I am too busy or too tired to write or the ideas just don’t want to flow. In those times, I have learned to take a break. This is a practical necessity in most cases, but experience has taught me not to fight the flow of creative energy. There’s little use in forcing yourself when you are tired, and I find that my pauses are often followed by surges of creativity. In other words, I have found that listening to your own energy levels in writing is also a great way to be efficient with your time.
About Claire E. Parsons
Claire E. Parsons is Of Counsel at Bricker Graydon LLP in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. She practices in Kentucky and Ohio in the areas of school law, employment law, and litigation. Claire represents public and private entities and their officials and employees in litigation, a general counsel capacity, and as a consultant and investigator. She is a frequent speaker and writing on legal topics and is the general editor of a forthcoming treatise on employment contracts for LexisNexis.
Claire is also a mindfulness and compassion teacher with more than 1000 hours of training in mind-body practices and a popular speaker on mental health, stress management, and wellness topics. She is the founder of the Brilliant Legal Mind blog, the author of How to Be a Badass Lawyer and Mommy Needs a Minute. To learn more and reach out, you can follow or connect with Claire on LinkedIn.
About the Legal Writing Interview Series
WordRake founder Gary Kinder created the software to help legal writers edit for brevity and simplicity. In continued dedication to the most effective legal writing, this Series highlights the experience and advice of experts from professors to writing coaches to litigators. Looking to help boost your legal writing skills? Get a free 1-week trial of WordRake here.
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