Legal drafting or documentation is mostly a skill an advocate must possess. Individual documentation works either under the supervision of a skilled lawyer or by realizing its significance or benefits after having stuck to the fundamentals of drafting. The following lists the principles and benefits of legal drafting.
The Principles at Play in Good Legal Drafting
These constitute the essence of the papers you have prepared to plead. They are the pillars of what you might stand for:
1. Party Details
This is merely a basic drawing principle. A draftsman should become familiar with the parties’ names, descriptions, and addresses as well as the topics that need to be discussed.
2. Contractual Capacity
A good draftsman must be aware of the parties’ freedom to enter a contract in the manner they intend. A minor, for example, is not permitted to engage in a contract without the consent of their legal guardian.
3. Unnecessary Words
To make the text precise, it should not contain extraneous words or information. Doing so will make the content difficult to understand and needlessly lengthy. Also, whenever possible, positive statements should be utilized rather than negative ones.
4. Layout
Before beginning the drafting process, it is always advisable to create an outline for the paper. It is like having to plan the document’s contents before organizing the laws, facts, and information in accordance with the plan. Legal drafting services are the best when it comes to layouts or templates.
5. Annexure
Wherever applicable, schedules and annexures must be supplied with the document. Moreover, correct references must be made to them within the document.
The Benefits of Good and Accurate Legal Drafting
The following are reasons why good legal drafting is important and hence, beneficial for everyone involved.
1. Credibility
You must express your argument in clear legal language to persuade the reader of your position. Motions, briefs, promissory notes, loan agreements, trust indentures, wills, plea agreements, etc. are just a few of the papers that lawyers prepare and edit.
2. Clarity
When was the last time you were reading a gripping book and came across the terms insofar or aforementioned? Of course, you don’t since overuse of unnecessary jargon destroys the flow of the story. Yet, legal writing is infamous for its use of jargon.
A disorderly framework also clouds your argument. Knowing your audience can help you minimize repetition, start with a topic sentence, start with a clear statement of the main idea, and break up long paragraphs of text with headings and subheadings. The clarity of your argument and readability go hand in hand. In other words, unorganized documents will not support your argument.
3. Quality
To accomplish their goal of persuading the reader, lawyers must write clearly and coherently. The reader should be given information on the particulars of the relevant law in the first paragraphs of any legal document. Even legal process outsourcing services recommend quality over quantity.
4. Reputation
Consider delivering a brief to the opposing counsel that is rife with factual errors, misspellings, legalese, and passive construction; what impact would it have on your team’s reputation? For a lawyer, your written work reflects your attorneys and clients. Therefore, you must always create excellent documents that are free of punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Include only the correct citations.
5. Results
You must create correctly structured papers when there is a significant potential for legal repercussions. The correctness and clarity of your legal writing could make the difference between succeeding or failing.
The Conclusion
It is now clear that one can draft a good legal document only when one realizes what a plea’s principles are. The article throws light on what improper or unsound drafts might lead to apart from losing arguments or the entire case. It is therefore important to go through the principles and benefits, apart from the procedure of drafting.
