I spent 19 years doing legal writing for a living, and I cannot even estimate how many millions of words I wrote on legal topics. It is odd, therefore, that when I come to collect examples of my writing for this website I cannot post a single example.
But my writing was of two kinds: writing in aid of specific matters, usually litigation matters, undertaken for a client, and writing done for partners to publish. Obviously I cannot publish any writing done on a client matter – they belong either to the client or to the firm, and most are confidential anyway. And although I prepared dozens of published articles, treatise chapters, seminar materials, and the like, these “practice development” writings (as they were called) properly belong to the firm, and to the partners who commissioned and signed them. I always felt, and continue to feel, that my work in preparing these materials was staff work, and that the name under which they were published was the name they ought to have. I cannot, therefore, now reprint any of these materials and call them my own.
Therefore the only legal writing I can publish here are my Tyrannical Laws, which as exercises in legislative drafting are a kind of legal writing, and the two dramatic works I wrote for the Golden Gate University Law School Trial Advocacy Program.
Why I have not posted any of my millions of words of legal writing.
I spent 19 years doing legal writing for a living, and I cannot even estimate how many millions of words I wrote on legal topics.1 It is odd, therefore, that when I come to collect examples of my writing for this website I cannot post a single example.
But my writing was of two kinds: writing in aid of specific matters, usually litigation matters, undertaken for a client, and writing done for partners to publish. Obviously I cannot publish any writing done on a client matter – they belong either to the client or to the firm, and most are confidential anyway. And although I prepared dozens of published articles, treatise chapters, seminar materials, and the like, these “practice development” writings (as they were called) properly belong to the firm, and to the partners who commissioned and signed them. I always felt, and continue to feel, that my work in preparing these materials was staff work, and that the name under which they were published was the name they ought to have. I cannot, therefore, now reprint any of these materials and call them my own.
Therefore the only legal writing I can publish here are my Tyrannical Laws, which as exercises in legislative drafting are a kind of legal writing, and the two dramatic works I wrote for the Golden Gate University Law School Trial Advocacy Program.