One of my students wrote this entertaining essay:

I majored in Business Administration at the University of North Carolina. Before entering law school, my only training in writing for the professional world came from a class called Management Communication, required of all UNC business students. In that class, we were coached using a variety of business-school-beloved acronyms and drilled in the ways of the corporate-writing world until we were as close to perfection as three credit hours and one semester of instruction would allow.

My professor for that class, Dr. Patricia Harms, was an exceptional communicator. She both spoke and wrote very well, and she consistently delivered information in an interesting manner. She also impressed upon us the importance of effective communication-explaining that the end goal of all communication is to impart pertinent information from speaker to audience, and that our highest duty should be to facilitate that transfer. If our class had had a mantra, it would have been, “Be clear. Be concise. Always consider your audience.”

As I began to read the material required for my law school classes, I thought back to what I had learned about writing in business school. I started to think longingly of the clear prose and the frank tone of the memos; I pined for the tell-it-to-me-straight attitude of the case studies; I believe I even yearned for the clarity of a well-constructed chart. Perhaps most of all, I missed the wonderful speed at which I used to be able to read the documents assigned for class. As a first-year law student, I found myself slogging through some of the most convoluted sentences I had ever seen-trying to hold multiple subjunctive clauses in my head, backtracking to find antecedents, performing mental contortions to work out the meaning of phrases like, “not antithetical to the dissent’s argument”-and all without a cheery graphic or even a friendly bullet point in sight! What kind of written world had I entered? Where, oh where, was the consideration for the reader?

For a while, I nurtured hope that I might get used to legal writing and no longer mind the effort required to wade my way through it. But having completed my first year of law school, I still feel most of the same frustration. Although I enjoyed our class discussion that cited inertia and ego as reasons for the persistence of these problems, my frustration is not relieved. These are not good enough excuses.

Of course, I acknowledge that some of the wordiness comes from the need to be accurate and thorough, but I believe that much of the verbosity in legal writing is unnecessary. I also feel a sense of incredulity that the legal profession, a service industry, has gotten away with writing so bewilderingly for so long. Take a lease agreement, for example: how can this profession draft a contract that is so confusing and out-of-touch with everyday English that I, even as a burgeoning law student, must grapple with phrases, re-read paragraphs, and generally wrestle with the meaning of the contract before I feel assured that I know what I am signing? I find such legal drafting maddening, and I hope never to inflict the same aggravation on others.

I should probably write Professor Harms (in a clear and concise manner, using an appropriate font, and incorporating a healthy dose of white space) to thank her for laying such a solid foundation for my professional writing career. On second thought, perhaps not. The frustration I feel with legal writing is, after all, largely her fault.