First and foremost, a brief must tell a compelling story. It should cry out for relief for your client. Judges are people; they want to feel like they are doing the right thing. Help them rule in your favor: tell your client’s story. Use classic archetypes. Cast the characters of your lawsuit into traditional roles in a story: victim, hero, orphan, widow, prodigal son, etc. Convince the Court that the world will be a better and fairer place if your client wins.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~ William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology, 1963

In response to last week’s Bard of the Bar post (Build Your House Part 2 – Blueprint), a colleague who receives this blog asked me to clarify what I meant by “annotated outline of the brief” in task five of the Blueprint Time Estimation Checklist. I would like to share my answer, and expound upon it a bit, in this post.

Below is a simple outline for planning a lengthy writing process, allowing you to work on several briefs simultaneously while managing the rest of your practice. It is necessary to jump into (and out of) each brief at a sensible point. Just like a contractor has to build more than one structure at a time, it is rarely possible to work on just one brief at a time. If you know where you are in the process, it is easier to start again after setting your brief aside for a few days.

We lawyers are not known for being good writers. Perhaps that is because writing is hard. Someone once said writing is easy—just open a vein!

The “preemption rule,” which has been adopted in a number of jurisdictions around the country, limits injured plaintiffs’ ability to prove wrongdoing against employers because, so long as an employer admits that it is vicariously liable for an employee’s negligence, the employer’s own potential acts of misconduct for negligent supervision, hiring, training, or entrustment are not disclosed to the trier-of-fact.

First and foremost, a brief must tell a compelling story. It should cry out for relief for your client. Judges are people; they want to feel like they are doing the right thing. Help them rule in your favor: tell your client’s story. Use classic archetypes. Cast the characters of your lawsuit into traditional roles in a story: victim, hero, orphan, widow, prodigal son, etc. Convince the Court that the world will be a better and fairer place if your client wins.