Legal Research

Posted by Wayne Schiess: "In general, when two words jointly modify a noun, those words should be hyphenated. Check any reliable style manual, like Bryan Garner's The Redbook or Words Into Type. They're called phrasal adjectives or compound modifiers. There are exceptions, but that's the general rule. The hyphen clarifies meaning and prevents miscues.

Lawyers tend not to use the hyphen for these phrasal adjectives and compound modifiers. One reason is that some don't know the rule. One reason is that some think that because most lawyers don't know the rule, using the hyphen will look wrong. And one reason is that legal writing has a lot of stock phrases that would technically require the hyphen but that are never confusing to lawyers, so leaving the hyphen out is mostly harmless.

For example, no lawyer will misunderstand these unhyphenated phrases:

summary judgment motion
common law rule
contingent fee case

But these unhyphenated phrases could cause confusion:

for profit organization
small business loan
criminal bill passage

Careful legal writers would hyphenate those phrases:

for-profit organization
small-business loan
criminal-bill passage

So one solution is to hyphenate miscue-causing, ambiguous phrasal adjectives but to leave alone stock phrases in legal writing.

I tend to use the hyphen in all but the most common stock phrases. So I write "legal-writing course" even though, if I omitted the hyphen, no one could be confused that I'm referring to a legal--as opposed to an illegal--writing course.

I can't tell you what to do. But tune your writing radar to this issue--raise your writing IQ."