Could a Checklist Improve Your Legal Writing?

This is a guest post by D’Andra Millsap Shu (Adjunct Professor, Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University) and Katherine T. Vukadin (Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law Houston)

What if we never made the same legal writing mistake twice? As legal writing students and even as attorneys, we tend to repeat our writing errors. A personalized legal writing checklist may help stamp out this problem.

Checklists are common in professions that call for mastery of extensive knowledge and exacting detail, such as medicine and aviation.[1] Legal writing, in some ways, is no different. Legal writing values precision, and mistakes can have serious consequences for clients and the writer. A checklist cannot of course compensate for mistakes of ignorance—those coming from a lack of knowledge necessary to carry out a task. But it can help us reduce mistakes of ineptitude, or the simple failure to apply our knowledge.[2]

For law students, the checklist can first come from the legal writing professor’s individualized critique of an assignment. When a legal writing professor closely reviews a student’s work, the student will want to adopt each aspect of the critique so the student’s subsequent work can progress in depth and accuracy. A student who creates a checklist from the professor’s critique will gain both understanding of its lessons as well as a tool for applying the critique to the next assignment. Students thus avoid mechanical completion of the professor’s revisions, and instead interact thoughtfully with each point.

The checklist’s creation can be a separate project, completed alongside the professor’s revisions. By sorting and naming the comments, students can keep their particular issues organized and will start to see the areas in which they most need to work. Once the checklist is created, the student can apply it to the next assignment. This way, mistakes from past assignments remain in the past.

Practicing attorneys and law professors too can benefit from a personalized writing checklist. The checklist’s contents can come from a colleague’s friendly revisions, from a legal writing book, from social media (both #appellatetwitter or #legalwriting on Twitter offer inspiration), or from one’s own list of individual quirks, such as frequently repeated or misspelled words. Even the most informal checklist, consisting perhaps of sticky notes attached to the computer screen, can help legal writers think twice before finishing a project.

A useful checklist is carefully designed and selective. No legal writer will have the time or inclination to wade through a list of obvious matters, such as format guidelines that have not proven problematic.  

Once the list is complete and pared down, consider organizing by the section of a legal writing project, for example, with some entries corresponding to the statement of facts, argument, and so forth. Some errors—use of the possessive, for example—may occur throughout a paper and can be placed first on the checklist, with a reminder to check for that item globally. Consider including checklist items specific to a particular assignment, such as a frequently-misspelled name or the transposition of letters in an abbreviation.

All legal writing mistakes are not equal. A misspelled client’s name, for example, can cast an otherwise impeccable brief in a negative light. A checklist can reflect this hierarchy, with the most crucial items starred, bolded, or written in another color. A legal writer is unlikely to ignore a checklist item with a large red dot next to it.

A checklist does not replace careful writing and proofreading, but it can serve as useful tool to help eliminate common, repetitive mistakes.

[1] See Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto 34 (Picador 2010).

[2] See id. at 8-10 (discussing the distinction between mistakes of ignorance and ineptitude).