Legal Research

Judge Rules on Grammar, Syntax

By Simon Fodden

A story that’s been making the rounds this week (Lawyerist –> Legal Blog Watch –> ABAJournal –> @davidtsfraser) deserves to be passed along one more step: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel got fed up with the way lawyers wrote the proposed orders submitted to him, so he sent a memo to the whole bankruptcy bar setting out his rules for doing it right. They’re a mix of regs on proper form and injunctions about some stuff that should have been learned in grade school.

For instance, in addition to a request that documents be submitted in PDF electronically, there’s a stricture on Capitalization of certain important-seeming Words:

Guideline No. 6 ? Capitalization
Lawyers apparently love to capitalize words. Pleadings, including proposed orders, are commonly full of words that are capitalized, not quite randomly, but certainly with great abandon. Please limit the use of capitalization to proper names. For example, do not capitalize court, motion, movant, debtor, trustee, order, affidavit, stipulation, mortgage, lease or any of the other numerous words that are commonly capitalized.

Kressel wants lawyers to use definite and indefinite articles: thus, “the debtor,” rather than “debtor” etc. He proscribes “and/or” and anathemtizes all the old standards, such as “heretofore,” “be, and hereby is,” “in and for,” and lots more.

Most poignant, I think, is his plea concerning possessives:

Guideline No. 16 ? Plurals and Possessives
Keep plurals and possessives straight and consistent. Know when to use debtors (plural), debtor?s (singular possessive), and debtors? (plural possessive). Make sure the verb matches the subject of the sentence.

Guideline No. 17 ? Its and It?s
Please use the possessive noun ?its? and the contraction ?it?s? correctly.

(I say “poignant” because it’s a lost cause. The apostrophe is doomed.)

Clearly there’s going to have to be some work at the factory this weekend revising the boilerplate and sweating over precedents that have been handed down carefully for generations.

You can peruse all 19 of Judge Kressel’s guidelines online.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on December 18, 2009 (boomark / email).