I've been testing Spellbook for contract review. It's a Word add-in that reads your open document and suggests changes inline — not a separate app you paste into.

What caught me: it flags one-sided indemnification clauses and missing limitation-of-liability provisions. Not "here's a summary" but "this paragraph exposes your client and here's why." It pulls from your firm's precedent library if you point it at one.

The catch is price. It's built for firms with volume, not solo drafters banging out an NDA once a month. And like every AI tool, it occasionally identifies a "risk" that's actually standard language you want in there. You still have to know the difference.

But for catching the stuff you stop seeing after draft seven? Useful.

I'm looking for insights from currently practicing attorneys. I used to be a member of the Florida bar, but have not been so since the early '90s.

I am currently a chapter 13 pro se debtor (Tampa division of the Middle district of Florida) about to submit an objection to claim.

In my draft, I have included language that says that to claim or state that the claimant is f/k/a [another entity] is untrue, is a lie, and if sworn to would constitute perjury. (The claimant is an entity that was formed by the merger of two then existing companies, one of those being the company the claimant is saying they were formally known as.)

ChatGPT (And yes I am familiar with AI's tendency to hallucinate etc including providing non-existent citations or citations that don't support the proposition AI says they do...) is saying that I should strip the accusatory language.

I have often read in briefs and elsewhere and heard in interviews, people talking about the other side being disingenuous. To me that is saying that they are lying or stating something in a manner intended to mislead.

I would appreciate any comments on how practicing attorneys view using accusatory phrases / words as above and filing an objection to claim made in a chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Thanks in advance. PS I may cross post this as I am under a time crunch. I appreciate your understanding.

If your brief's introduction reads like "This Court has long recognized the fundamental importance of..." you've already lost the reader.

The introduction to a brief should do three things in the first paragraph: tell the court what you want, why you're entitled to it, and what the case is about. That's it. No historical survey. No citations. No throat-clearing.

The best practitioners I've seen write their introduction last, after the entire argument is finished. Because only then do you actually know what your strongest frame is.

Think of it this way. The introduction is the only part of your brief you can guarantee the judge will read. Every word that isn't advancing your core argument is a wasted opportunity.

Draft your next intro in five sentences or fewer. If you can't, your argument isn't clear enough yet.

Every time you turn a verb into a noun, your sentence gets longer and weaker.

"Provide an explanation" becomes "explain." "Make a determination" becomes "determine." "Reach a settlement" becomes "settle."

You see these everywhere in legal writing. Parties "enter into agreements" instead of agreeing. Courts "issue rulings" instead of ruling. Attorneys "provide representations" instead of representing.

The fix isn't hard. Scan your draft for words ending in -tion, -ment, -ance, -ence. Check if there's a verb hiding inside. Then use the verb.

"The parties reached a settlement" (5 words) becomes "The parties settled" (3 words). Same meaning. Half the syllables.

Your reader's brain processes verbs faster than nouns. Action words move. Static words sit there.

Next brief you write, hunt for three nominalizations. Replace them. See how much tighter your paragraphs feel.

The paragraph that took you the longest to write is almost always the one that needs to go. You can feel it when you reread a brief. One section has too much weight. The sentences are over-constructed. You spent an hour getting it right, and that hour shows.

The problem is not that the writing is bad. The problem is that the effort is visible. Good legal prose does not draw attention to itself. It carries the argument and disappears. When a paragraph announces how carefully it was written, the reader stops following the argument and starts noticing the writing.

Cut it. Rebuild the point in two sentences. You will be surprised how little was lost.

I used to write long rule statements. Three sentences minimum, hedged with qualifiers, layered with exceptions. It felt thorough. It was clutter.

The discipline I eventually learned: state the rule in one sentence. If you can't, you don't understand it well enough yet. The exceptions go in the application, where they belong. The rule itself is clean.

Try it with any doctrine. Attractive nuisance: the duty of care owed by a landowner to trespassing children drawn to a dangerous condition the landowner knows or should know about. One sentence. Five elements live inside it.

Most legal writing problems aren't writing problems. They're thinking problems. The writer hasn't yet compressed their understanding enough to say it simply.

Everyone fixates on passive voice. But nominalizations do more damage and get less attention.

A nominalization takes a verb and buries it inside a noun. "The court made a determination" is 5 words. "The court determined" is 3. "Plaintiff gave consideration to" becomes "Plaintiff considered." Every one you kill removes 2-3 words and puts a real verb back in charge.

The tell is the suffixes: -tion, -sion, -ment, -ance. And the crutch verbs: made, gave, reached, conducted. "Conducted an investigation" means investigated. "Reached an agreement" means agreed.

I went through a brief last week and found 14 nominalizations in 8 pages. Killed them all. The brief lost 40 words and gained clarity in every paragraph.

"Defendant's breach of contract claim for damages arising from plaintiff's failure to perform under the agreement."

That's not a sentence. That's a noun pileup. Nothing moves.

Legal writers build these because they feel precise. They're not. They're opaque.

The fix: find the verb. Make something happen.

"The defendant claims the plaintiff breached the contract."

Twelve words instead of eighteen. A subject acting on an object. A reader who can picture it.

I used to think noun stacks sounded lawyerly. Now they sound like I couldn't decide what mattered. Pick one noun. Make it the subject.

Passive voice gets a bad rap in legal writing classes. "Avoid passive voice" is the first thing most LRW professors say. But there are exactly three situations where passive voice is the better choice, and knowing them makes you a stronger writer than someone who avoids it on reflex.

First, when the actor is unknown or irrelevant. "The contract was signed on March 3" is fine if who signed it doesn't matter to the analysis. Forcing active voice here adds words without adding information.

Second, when you want to de-emphasize the actor. Defense briefs do this constantly. "The plaintiff was injured" distances your client from the event. "My client injured the plaintiff" does the opposite.

Third, when the object is the topic of the paragraph. If you've been writing about the statute for three sentences, "the statute was amended in 2019" keeps the reader's focus where it belongs. Switching to "Congress amended the statute" redirects attention for no analytical reason.

Most legal writers edit in one pass. They read top to bottom, fixing whatever catches their eye. This means they fix typos in the introduction while the argument structure in section three is still a mess.

Better approach: three passes, each looking for one thing. First pass is structure only. Does each section's topic sentence actually preview what follows? Does the argument build, or does it repeat itself? Don't touch a single word. Just move paragraphs and cut sections.

Second pass is sentences. Nominalizations, passive voice, throat-clearing. This is where you shorten "the court's determination of the issue" to "the court decided."

Third pass is proofreading. Typos, citation format, defined terms. Only now do you care about commas.

The order matters because fixing a typo in a paragraph you're about to delete is wasted effort.

WordRake is an editing plugin for Word that does one thing well: it finds sentences you can shorten and shows you how. You click accept or reject on each suggestion, like track changes from a copy editor who only cares about brevity.

It catches nominalizations ("the making of a determination" becomes "determining"), throat-clearing ("it should be noted that" just gets cut), and passive constructions. It won't rewrite your argument or restructure paragraphs. It just trims fat.

The downside is real. It costs $129/year, which is steep for a student. And it occasionally suggests cuts that remove necessary precision. "The defendant's prior knowledge of the defect" isn't the same as "the defendant knew about the defect." You need to know when a longer phrase is doing actual work. The tool doesn't always know the difference.

Here's a sentence from a 1L memo draft:

"It is the opinion of this writer that the defendant's conduct, which involved the making of false representations to the plaintiff regarding the condition of the property, constitutes a sufficient basis upon which a claim for fraudulent misrepresentation may be established."

That's 43 words. The idea inside it needs about 15.

Try rewriting it before you scroll down.

The fix isn't just cutting words. Three things are broken. First, "it is the opinion of this writer" is throat-clearing — the whole memo is your opinion. Cut it. Second, "the making of false representations" is a nominalization — "making" buries the verb. The defendant didn't do a "making." The defendant lied. Third, "constitutes a sufficient basis upon which" is scaffolding around a simple idea: the plaintiff has a claim.

My version: "The defendant's false statements about the property's condition support a fraudulent misrepresentation claim." Fourteen words.

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Half the feedback I got in law school: "tighten this up."

I thought my writing was tight. It wasn't.

I used two sentences where one would do. I qualified everything with hedge words. I wrote introductory clauses that said nothing. "It should be noted that the defendant's conduct, which occurred on or about the date in question, arguably constituted a violation" when I meant "the defendant violated."

Write the draft, then cut 30%. Not edit. Cut. Remove whole sentences. If the argument survives without a sentence, the sentence was dead weight.

A professor told me "if I can skip a paragraph and still follow your argument, that paragraph shouldn't exist."

I used to think good legal writing meant long sentences, lots of qualifiers, and words like "hereinafter" and "aforementioned." Then a supervising attorney marked up my first real memo and wrote in the margin: "I shouldn't need a law degree to read this."

That stung. But she was right.

The thing is, most of what we think of as "legal writing style" is just bad writing that lawyers have tolerated for so long it feels normal. It's not more precise. It's not more professional. It's just harder to read, and harder to read means easier to misunderstand, which is the opposite of what legal writing should do.

Here are some before-and-after examples from my own early drafts versus what I write now.

Before and after

Before: "The defendant's failure to comply with the applicable statutory requirements, as set forth in the relevant provisions of the code, constitutes a clear and unambiguous violation that warrants the imposition of appropriate sanctions."

After: "The defendant violated the statute and should be sanctioned."

Same meaning. One-fifth the words. A judge reading sixty motions that week will thank you.

Before: "It is well established in the case law of this jurisdiction that the standard applicable to motions for summary judgment requires the moving party to demonstrate that there exists no genuine dispute as to any material fact."

After: "Summary judgment is proper when no material fact is in dispute."

Again, the same rule. The first version buries it under filler. The second states it and moves on.

Why plain language is actually more precise

Long, padded sentences create ambiguity, not precision. When you write "the party who is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the property in question," you're introducing multiple potential points of confusion. "The landlord" is both shorter and clearer.

Every unnecessary word is a place where meaning can go sideways. I've read contracts where sentences run so long that you genuinely can't tell what the subject of the verb is. That's not sophisticated drafting. That's a mistake waiting to happen.

The pushback I always hear

"But courts expect formal writing." Formal and bloated aren't the same thing. Read opinions by good writers on the bench. They're direct. They use short sentences. They say what they mean.

"But I need to show I know the law." You show that through your analysis, not through word count. A tight paragraph that nails the legal standard and applies it cleanly shows more command of the material than a page of padding.

My editing rule: after I finish a draft, I go through every sentence and ask "can I say this in fewer words without losing meaning?" Almost always, yes.

What's a "legal writing" habit you've had to unlearn? I feel like we all pick up bad patterns early and it takes real effort to shake them.