Legal ghostwriters help trial lawyers save time and money. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ghostwriting is writing for someone considered the author. This practice is prevalent in the legal field.

Prepositions can add valuable detail and complexity to sentences, but they also invite nominalizations, passive constructions, and bloat. When these single-word connectors pile up in writing, you can kill the flow of your sentence and confuse your reader. What could make this worse? Multi-word prepositions.

Legal dramas are full of hot-headed lawyers overflowing with righteous indignation, ready to steamroll injustice by the force of their convictions. The courtroom scenes play out with biting repartee and shouts of “objection!” until at last the verdict is revealed, and the “good guys” walk away with their hard-earned, well-deserved victory. Opposing counsel glares as our heroic lawyer marches triumphantly to a waiting crowd of excited reporters and shares the good news.

Legal writing challenged me. I was already a good writer: I obtained my bachelor's degree in English literature, and I had written more academic papers than the average college student. I thought I’d earned my right to proclaim mastery. However, legal writing was radically the opposite of everything I learned in my B.A. program—so much so, that it leveled the playing field and catapulted me to the starting line again with everyone else. The literary world is all about creative freedom and self-expression through liberal use of writing devices like metaphors, allegory, etc. In contrast, legal writing is technical or business writing where clarity of thought and economy of words is key. To master legal writing, I had to unlearn deeply instilled and contrary habits.

If your organization cuts cost but doesn’t increase value, then you’re doing transformation wrong. This is a sign you’re adding complexity and processes that clients don’t want to pay for and your lawyers hate. But don’t give up. It is possible to ease burdens, elevate work, and satisfy clients simultaneously. The key is implementing improvements that increase value from the client’s perspective. To do so, it's time to move our focus from process to value. Take a holistic approach to workflow improvement by using the value stream framework.

“The biggest misconception is that paralegals are clerical staff. And, although a paralegal may perform clerical duties—and make no mistake, clerical staff are important to a law firm—a paralegal’s function can go far beyond clerical duties.

A properly trained paralegal will have a handle on several substantive areas of the law and can assist in functions such as drafting documents, investigating claims, engaging with clients, preparing witnesses, and planning trial strategy.”

— Keith Shannon, paralegal educator

When we start out as lawyers, we’re so afraid of being caught unprepared that we try to memorize every fact, every detail, and every statute. It seems like the smart thing to do. After all, doesn’t every job posting require “attention to detail”? The problem is that details become our security blanket. When a partner, a judge, or a potential client asks a question, we regurgitate the facts we memorized the night before and rattle off code sections—surely, our knowledge will impress our audience.

Addressing your reader and potential client’s problems entails lending a listening ear and showing genuine empathy. Every problem you encounter has a human and emotional aspect that requires a proper and sensitive approach. Whether it’s a contract dispute over the interpretation of a cessation of business clause, an excused performance under a force majeure clause, or responsibility for undelivered goods, each case is a legal question to you—but never forget that it’s an emotional issue for your client. These situations call for empathy. And that means you must connect with your clients on a more personal level to address their pain points.

For most lawyers and law firms, their business strategy is three words long: “Do good work.” The assumption is that individual effort and intelligence are all that it takes to succeed. If it were ever true, it isn’t anymore. Today there’s a breakdown in trust and an uptick in blame that’s getting in the way of “good work.”

Innovation is now becoming an annoying buzzword. Even for people inclined to embrace legal innovation, the word is now eliciting groans. And for people afraid of change, innovation is such a loaded word that even thinking about it is overwhelming.