Drafting Guide For Private Legal Documents

This guide is for drafters of contracts, leases, wills and other legal documents in England and Wales who want to produce instruments that are effective, clear and pleasing - both for the writer and the reader.

This clearly structured and well-referenced book shows how and why traditional legal language has developed some of the peculiar characteristics that sometimes make legal documents inaccessible to the end users. It examines recent reforms in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and North America, and provides a critical examination of case law and the rules of interpretation. Practical elements are also covered. Detailed case studies illustrate how obtuse words and phrases can be reworked or removed. Particularly useful is the step-by-step guide to drafting in the modern style, using examples drawn from four types of legal documents: leases, company constitutions, wills and conveyances. Readers of this book will receive clear instructions on how to make their writing clearer and their legal documents more useful to clients and colleagues. This book will benefit all law students and professionals.

Haggard's Legal Drafting in a Nutshell provides guidelines for producing documents that serve the client's needs, solve existing problems, and prevent future problems. Authoritative coverage overviews the general drafting process and offers tips on getting started. Provides guidelines for drafting within the law and choosing the proper concept. Also identifies ambiguities, definitions, and drafting ethics.

"This update of Howard Darmstadter's witty, accessible guide to legal drafting reminds practitioners how best to choose their words, to compose clear and succinct sentences, to lay out their documents, and to decide which documents best serve a given scenario. This book may be unconventional, but it is a vital element of any lawyer's library."--BOOK JACKET.

Haggard and Kuney's Legal Drafting in a Nutshell provides guidance on producing transactional documents, contracts, instruments, legislation, and regulations that solve existing problems and prevent future problems. It offers both a large-scale overview of the drafting process and a small-scale discussion of the mechanics of legal documents at the sentence, word, and punctuation level.

This is the third edition of Robert Dick's informative guide to drafting. In this edition he emphasises that plain language in the use of legal documents is here to stay.