Lawyers are known for their skill in oratory. Even though a fair number of lawyers have musical talent, and some even perform with choirs and rock bands when they have reached a stage in their careers when they have time to devote to musical rehearsals, most of them first fell in love with the spotlight during speech and debate competitions in high school. You may not be as young and handsome as you were in high school, but you have mastered the dramatic pause and the voice modulations necessary to make your words stay on the audience’s minds for years to come, even with your dad-bod and your receding hairline. You shine in conversation as much as you do in the courtroom. As much as you may charm your clients with your verbal skills during initial consultations, this is not how you make your bread and butter, especially if you offer free initial consultations. A larger portion of your job involves legal writing. Here are some ways that family law attorneys can craft persuasive legal documents that are as memorable as live interactions with the eloquent lawyers themselves.
Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves in Your Legal Writing
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when you are trying to persuade a judge to award your client his or her fair share of marital property, numbers are worth their value in word count, too. Show your artistry not only by crafting sentences but also by summoning mathematical equations. Most states have statewide guidelines for calculating child support, but when it comes to seeking equitable distribution of marital property, taking issue with the amount of income that the court imputed to your client or your client’s ex, or showing that the timesharing schedule, the court has ordered is untenable, math is the most effective rhetorical device. For example, you might just need to use the insert equation command on Microsoft Word and type a quadratic equation to show just how much money your client loses by driving to a Walmart centrally located between her house and her ex-husband’s house every Friday during the afternoon rush hour.
The numerical values that you fill into the equations are not especially persuasive if the judge has reason to believe that you pulled them out of thin air. Rely on vocational experts and published data, and then calculate the differences between the judge’s orders and your client’s lived experience.
Collaborate With the Other Spouse’s Lawyer, Even If It Isn’t Technically a Collaborative Divorce
You might be at your most verbally dexterous when you are writing a petition or memorandum to a judge; perhaps you can even imagine the judge quoting it in a ruling or court order. In family law, though, just as in some other areas of civil law, most legal matters do not end with a decision by a judge. Instead, the parties reach a settlement. Therefore, the most persuasive thing you can write, if client satisfaction is the measure of persuasiveness, is a settlement offer that will persuade your client’s spouse or co-parent to agree to terms acceptable to your client. You can only do this if the terms are also acceptable to your client’s ex.
Your best collaborator in this regard is the lawyer representing your client’s ex. In collaborative divorce, spouses going through a divorce pretend to get along with each other while their lawyers negotiate. In contested divorce cases, the lawyers continue to work together with the best of their negotiation skills, even if the parties to the divorce case make some pretense of hiding their animosity toward each other.
Rely on Precedents in Your State’s Case Law
You knew you were on your way to being a superstar lawyer when you saw your score on the analogical reasoning section of the LSAT. Use your talent for analogy to draw parallels between previous cases that the family law courts have decided in your state and the case that your client is facing now. If you can show the judge that what was fair in Bloggins v. Bloggins is also fair for your client, you do not have to reinvent the wheel; you might even be able to save yourself the effort of typing all those quadratic equations. You might even want to quote directly from earlier cases that resemble yours; you might even borrow a few turns of phrase from earlier case law and remix them in your own legal writing.
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