Ryan McCarl is the founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and the author of Elegant Legal Writing, published by University of California Press. Before law, Ryan taught ninth- and tenth-grade history, earned a master's in education from the University of Michigan, and took poetry workshops for credit while at the University of Chicago Law School. He went on to a two-year faculty fellowship in AI law and policy at UCLA School of Law, where he designed and taught an advanced legal writing course from scratch — the curriculum that eventually became this book.
When I first saw the title, I thought, another book on legal writing. After reading it, I was impressed enough to want to sit down with the author. Elegant Legal Writing isn't just another riff on plain language. It draws on copywriting, graphic design, creative writing workshops, and old-school essayists like H.L. Mencken and George Orwell, alongside the more familiar canon of Ross Guberman and Bryan Garner. Ryan is unusually willing to challenge entrenched practices — footnotes, IRAC, the practice of spelling out numbers — and unusually clear about why.
In this conversation we get into what "elegance" actually means in a brief, why he thinks IRAC and CRAC are oversimplified, why footnotes deserve a comeback, where the high-brow and low-brow influences in his book come from, and what it actually takes to land a book deal with an academic publisher while running a litigation practice. Keep reading below for the full episode and the complete transcript of our conversation.
Top Insights
Below are the highlights of our conversation:
- Elegance Is Tasteful Simplicity, Not Decoration: Ryan defines elegance the way the OED does — tasteful simplicity in the choice and arrangement of words. The plain-language part is table stakes: clarity, readability, no jargon. The aesthetic part is what most lawyers skip. Judges face the same attention constraints as the rest of us in the digital age, and pacing, rhythm, and forward movement in prose are what turn a brief from something a judge skims to something a judge actually finishes.
- Conclusions Plus Reasons Beats IRAC: Ryan rejects IRAC and CRAC as the organizing framework for legal arguments. The "rule plus facts equals conclusion" frame misses where the meat of any contested case actually lives — in the mutual adjustment of how you characterize the rule and how you characterize the facts. He proposes leading with the conclusion and then supporting it with reasons in order of strength, where each reason is a woven combination of legal premises and fact premises. It maps directly to how a judge actually reads a motion: what are you asking me to do, and why.
- Footnotes Are a Design Tool, Not a Sin: The traditional hostility to footnotes in litigation has no good basis, and the top firms — Wilmer Hale, Gibson Dunn, the Solicitor General's Office — already use them. Ryan goes further than Bryan Garner: footnotes are a way to signal at a glance what's primary and what's secondary, so a judge with 200 to 1,200 active cases can extract the load-bearing argument in the fifteen or twenty minutes they actually have.
- Borrow From Marketing, Web Design, and the Great Essayists: Ryan's influences are deliberately eclectic. He cites David Ogilvy on advertising, books on graphic design, fiction workshops, and essayists like H.L. Mencken, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, and John Cheever. The connection isn't strained: a litigator trying to reach a judge with a thousand cases is solving the same attention problem a marketer is solving on a landing page — clear call to action, then reasons, in a format that doesn't fight the reader.
- The Book Deal Was Five Years of Iteration: Ryan tried to write a memoir, started a book on education in his mid-twenties, and pitched proposals that got partway and then died. Elegant Legal Writing only worked because he had already produced 400 pages of slides and handouts teaching the course at UCLA, then went through query letter, proposal, four anonymous peer reviewers, internal press vote, and faculty vote. After the manuscript was accepted, he rewrote essentially the entire thing — almost no sentence from the accepted draft survived. The thing that kept him going was reframing the project as teaching rather than ego.
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Full Transcript
Khurram Naik: Ryan, great to sit down with you. I'm really excited to talk about your book and your story.
Ryan McCarl: Thank you for having me.
Khurram Naik: So your book is called Elegant Legal Writing. What do you mean by elegant? What's elegant?
Ryan McCarl: The word elegance, in the sense I'm using it, refers to tasteful simplicity in the choice and arrangement of words. That's a quote from the Oxford English Dictionary that I have in the introduction, and I think it accurately describes what I'm going for. What I recommend is in line with what legal writing gurus and professors have taught for decades — writing in plain language, disposing of unnecessary jargon and legalese, prioritizing clarity and readability. That's the simplicity part.
Ryan McCarl: But I also believe that once those values are satisfied, you should also think about aesthetic considerations. One of the constraints judges face, in addition to limited time and mental energy, is motivation and attention span — just like the rest of us in the digital age. So if you can make your writing enjoyable to read by following good aesthetic practices and paying attention to things typically not considered — pacing, writing in an engaging way, making sure the brief has forward movement in how its prose reads — that will make it more likely the judge prioritizes reading your brief, actually reads it rather than skimming, and completes it. The judge has to first read your brief and then understand your argument in order to even have the possibility of being moved to accept it.
Khurram Naik: Are there any litigators you find to be consistently great writers?
Ryan McCarl: I've always loved Ross Guberman's book Point Made, which I've read and listened to many times since law school. It's filled with great examples of appellate litigators who write in a way that's lucid and engaging. The US Solicitor General's Office, which does a lot of Supreme Court advocacy, has traditionally been at the forefront of good legal writing and oral advocacy practices. I also find that litigators at top firms — elite firms, Gibson Dunn for example — tend to use best practices around plain language and show greater attention to the nuances of language than you'd find at more typical firms.
Ryan McCarl: I don't have any specific litigators I tout as writing one way or the other, but when I search for good examples — sometimes for the book, sometimes for teaching — I'll go to Lexis or Westlaw and search for whatever procedural posture I'm interested in, couple it with the name of an elite firm, run it through, and pretty quickly identify an example of writing that isn't turgid and unreadable, which is kind of the norm in our profession.
Khurram Naik: Is there any subject matter of litigation where you tend to find a particularly high concentration of good writers?
Ryan McCarl: Constitutional litigation to some degree, although I don't practice much in that area. A lot of attorneys who focus on constitutional and appellate work are writing appellate briefs and arguing at the appellate level, so they tend to be a little more attuned to good legal storytelling, and they're writing for courts with very high expectations. People rise to the level of the competition when they're arguing before the Supreme Court.
Ryan McCarl: There are other areas of law where writing in a lucid and engaging way is especially a challenge. Patent law, for example — it's challenging to explain the facts about an invention if you don't have a science or technical background in the relevant area. Also any area of law that's developed in a convoluted way, or where you're interpreting a convoluted statute or contract. I actually relish writing briefs in areas like that because of the challenge, but it has to be understood that the material is hard to read inherently. It's substantively complex.
Ryan McCarl: The advice I give attorneys is: the more substantively complex the information you're conveying, the more you should ensure that your sentences are syntactically simple, your paragraphs are short and focused, and you've ruthlessly weeded out any unnecessary complexity. You want to chart a path for the judge through the relevant law, rather than adding complexity with language — which is more what typically occurs.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned Ross Guberman earlier. He came in and did a training at my firm probably ten years ago. I had a really positive impression, though I don't remember exactly what points I took away. I'd be curious to hear from you — Ross Guberman, Bryan Garner — those are two of the bigger names in legal writing. What do you see as their key innovations or contributions, and in what ways is your book a departure?
Ryan McCarl: I've read both of their work extensively, many times. It's integrated into my framework for thinking about writing. Ross Guberman's strength, in my view, is his mining of good examples and deriving from them what he calls advocacy moves. One of the first ones he talks about, I believe, is "one fell swoop" — where you distinguish an entire line of precedents at once by finding the common thread that makes them distinguishable, rather than going piecemeal through each case. Those simple little touches simplify the argument and simplify the problem space for the judge, and give them a way to think about the case that aligns with what you want.
Ryan McCarl: That's a different project from what I've done in Elegant Legal Writing. There's some overlap, but I focus first on prose mechanics — prose aesthetics, how to write precisely and clearly, the nuts and bolts of good sentences and paragraphs, how to organize documents — followed by chapters on substance: argumentation, using legal authority, writing good facts sections. Then I dip into topics that aren't covered as much in most other books on legal writing — writing productivity, using technology in advanced ways, and legal typography and document design.
Ryan McCarl: The unifying theme is that judges have cognitive and time constraints — the same ones all readers face, but particularly acute. So what's important is to show the judge you're going to be helpful, make your point very quickly, and then write your brief in a way that's considerate of their time and energy, that's designed to hold attention and is aesthetically pleasing right down to the font you choose.
Ryan McCarl: As for Bryan Garner, he's the traditional guru of the profession in recent decades. I've read a lot of his books and learned a great deal from him. He's done a great deal to make plain-language principles the expectation and the norm in legal writing — that's his central contribution. He's also an expert in lexicography and word usage. His Modern English Usage is on my shelf, frequently used, full of tabs. The way Ken Adams has gone into great depth on contract law, Bryan Garner has done with legal language more generally.
Ryan McCarl: Another thing about Bryan Garner I appreciate, and have built on, is his challenge to the traditional hostility to footnotes. That was a very well-entrenched practice in the legal tradition — avoiding footnotes, putting everything in the main text on various theories that judges don't like them. Bryan Garner did a lot to move the profession away from that by saying there shouldn't be substantive footnotes, but at least we should put reference material in footnotes. I actually go further in my book. I don't think there's any real good reason for the tradition's hostility. Footnotes are a great way to increase visual variety in a brief, but more importantly to signal at a glance to the judge what the most important parts are. If the judge only reads it once, only devotes fifteen or twenty minutes to it, what do you need them to read versus what is secondary — whether reference material, or an argument you're making to avoid waiver, or a response to an insignificant contention. There are quite a few use cases for footnotes that fit the basic principle of using design to communicate what's most important.
Ryan's framing of footnotes as a design tool — using visual hierarchy to do work the prose can't do alone — sits next to what Tim Yoo described in his episode about studying elite performers from outside the law for an edge. Same mindset: don't just inherit the profession's defaults, find the better practice wherever it lives. Listen to my conversation with Tim Yoo.
Khurram Naik: At a high level, your book covers style — concision, plain language, tone, professionalism — substance, like using legal authority and legal storytelling, and process, the mental game of writing and writing with technology. Style, substance, and process. What's the specific point in the book you think people are most likely to disagree with?
Ryan McCarl: The footnotes one is definitely a conversation starter, because it goes further than other legal writing experts and certainly further than most litigators do. But if you look closely at how the top advocates write — people who argue frequently before the Supreme Court, people getting paid $2,000 an hour at places like Wilmer Hale or Gibson Dunn — you'll find a lot of footnotes, just like you'll find writing that's closer to a New Yorker article than to a traditional legal filing. My take on footnotes is still controversial because no one's quite come out and said, "go for it," even though every other academic field uses them without a problem. And it's an obstacle to readability to put reference information or asides in the main text on the same footing from a design perspective as the core points.
Ryan McCarl: Another point I make, in the chapter on briefs and motions, is that I really challenge the IRAC and CRAC paradigms and similar argument-organization paradigms that are still being taught to law students. You'll see this on LinkedIn — a lot of people who write about legal writing still advocating, just follow IRAC. I don't agree those are actually that helpful a framework for thinking about legal reasoning or organizing an argument. They're oversimplified. They typically miss the point of most arguments, because if it were as straightforward as applying a known rule to known facts, there wouldn't be much to argue about.
Ryan McCarl: Most of the meat of a contested legal argument in a hard case is going to be arguing about the nuances of what a rule means and how that interacts with the facts. When people think about IRAC or CRAC, they tend to juxtapose what they say is the rule against what they say are the facts and say, together these support the conclusion. But everything within defining the rule, defining the facts in light of the rule, and mutually adjusting both — that's all the meat of analysis.
Ryan McCarl: So I propose a different approach: think about it in terms of traditional informal logic, as conclusions plus reasons. Lead with the conclusion, then support it with the reasons that lead to it, in order of strength. A reason to accept a legal conclusion is typically a combination of interwoven legal premises — rule statements — and fact premises — the facts of the case.
Khurram Naik: That makes a lot of sense. I think about how to apply legal writing to other domains. For instance, I've got some structural rentals, and oftentimes I have to interface with platforms or vendors or different stakeholders to resolve an issue. When I write to those people, I'm using legal writing skills, but I'm not doing some sort of IRAC-style analysis. It's much more like what you're saying — here's the conclusion, then interweaving the facts and rules. I lead with the conclusion because there's a call to action — I'm looking for this outcome. Then the reasons why. If you think practically about how you'd persuade someone — marshal authority, frame the ask for clarity so they know what you're looking for — that's exactly what you're saying.
Ryan McCarl: The call-to-action analysis you made is actually quite helpful. I've dabbled in web design and user experience issues — partly because I had a web startup a few years ago, and also in the course of researching for Elegant Legal Writing. I read books about design to try to understand how design principles could inform how we write briefs, so they're easier to read, get our messages across more clearly, and are more pleasant to read.
Ryan McCarl: The call-to-action idea from web design and marketing is to have a very clear ask. The reader of a web page doesn't have to look very hard or wonder what you want, because it's clearly stated. In law, the same exact principle applies. When you write a motion seeking legal relief, the first question the judge will always have is, what are you asking me to do? They want to be specifically told, both in terms of the particular ruling and the remedy. And then, why is the next question. Why should I do that for you? Why is the opponent wrong? That follows the conclusions-plus-reasons paradigm — the logical structure of what a judge actually needs when they open the brief.
Khurram Naik: With this style-substance-process conception, what do you think is your competitive advantage as a writer?
Ryan McCarl: For me, it's the fact that I've been teaching for a long time at different levels. Before law school I taught ninth and tenth grade history. Now I sometimes teach law school advanced legal writing courses, teach CLEs. The book itself is an exercise in teaching. My blog is at elegantlegalwriting.com. Part of it is thinking about how to reach learners who might be tuned out or skeptical of the importance of the topic, or who may not yet have the complete framework or mental schema you have as the teacher. How do you motivate someone to want to read what you say, and then quickly convey the essential information so that learning isn't dependent on the reader's self-motivation? You help them learn almost inadvertently — you get their attention and quickly convey what you need to, while addressing any potential lapses in comprehension as early as possible.
Ryan McCarl: The other part is that I just love language. I'm a lifelong reader and writer. I've taken creative writing workshops, written parts of a memoir, done a lot of reading about general composition, fiction writing, poetry writing. I actually took poetry workshops at the University of Chicago when I was in law school, for credit, which was pretty cool. Being highly attuned to language, and thinking about how to write for aesthetic reasons separate from making legal arguments — there's a lot of wisdom in those sources. Books about general composition, fiction workshops. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to apply techniques about pacing, rhythm, and emphasis to legal writing.
Ryan McCarl: Aesthetics will always be secondary to substance in legal writing, but in Elegant Legal Writing I argue they're more intertwined than people think. You can usually convey difficult ideas in a way that's still pleasant to read — closer to what you'd find in The New Yorker or other general nonfiction.
Khurram Naik: What nonfiction writer has influenced you the most? Not necessarily someone who's influenced your writing — but a nonfiction writer who's influenced how you think and approach writing.
Ryan McCarl: Some have written about writing itself — Jacques Barzun, Joseph Williams are good examples, and I mention them in the resources section of the book. Setting that aside and thinking about more general nonfiction writers, it's honestly somewhat older — the public-intellectual writers, the great essayists of the past. More recently you might include Christopher Hitchens. Going further back, H.L. Mencken, that very caustic, savage writer from the 1920s and 1930s. I wouldn't necessarily emulate his tone or his misanthropy, but his way of crafting prose is phenomenal. C.S. Lewis is another example, writes in a very lucid and engaging way. George Orwell in his essays. In fiction, John Cheever's short stories — lucid, gorgeous prose. I could come up with quite a few others, but I just really appreciate artful prose like you find in the great modern essayists of the past couple of centuries.
Khurram Naik: What I find really interesting is that you're not just drawing from those serious literary influences. You're also drawing from marketing — and from older content, not necessarily contemporary. The principles of copywriting have endured a long time, and some of the most skilled writers on the internet today cite what they've learned from copywriters from fifty or eighty years ago. People like David Ogilvy — when you read his work, he's a clear writer and very persuasive. There's a lot to learn from both highbrow and, if you want to call it, lowbrow sources about persuasion and clarity.
Ryan McCarl: I do have Ogilvy on Advertising somewhere on my bookshelf, as well as books on graphic design. You take wisdom wherever you find it. The core principles of good design, good aesthetics, good prose — there's a major shared core of wisdom and purpose. The people working on UX and marketing today, although quite different in terms of aims and audience from some of the writers I mentioned, are facing a challenge really similar to what litigators face: how do you reach an audience that doesn't have time or necessarily inclination to listen to you? How do you break through the noise of modern technology, all the distractions a consumer might be doing instead of paying attention to your ad? It's a bit of a dark art sometimes in marketing, but it's the same exact thing trial lawyers have to do when they're trying to reach a judge who has anywhere from 200 to 1,200 or more active cases.
Ryan's willingness to put H.L. Mencken, John Cheever, David Ogilvy, and graphic design textbooks on the same shelf as Bryan Garner is the same cross-domain move Tim Yoo described in his episode on what lawyers can learn from pro wrestling, applied math, and tennis. The edge comes from not respecting the silos. Listen to my conversation with Tim Yoo.
Khurram Naik: So you clearly managed to write for some time now — sorry, I used the word "clearly," I know you told me I shouldn't use that. But when did you decide you wanted to write a book on legal writing?
Ryan McCarl: To be clear — "clearly," as an intensifier to bolster a conclusion without providing backing, is my issue with it. As an adverb to describe a good prose style, it's just fine.
Ryan McCarl: I decided to write a book about writing probably back in 2020, when I was doing a two-year faculty fellowship in AI law and policy at UCLA School of Law. I don't remember exactly what spurred me other than love of language, but I was able to convince the curriculum committee to let me teach an advanced legal writing course, which I designed from scratch. In developing that curriculum and doing research over the summers — reading as many books on prose style, general design, and legal writing as I could — I tried to distill the most helpful principles for attorneys and law students to know.
Ryan McCarl: A lot of it aligned with what stylists have said before — this is a craft, there's a common core of shared writing advice on things like concision and plain language. But there's also a lot of practices that just aren't the norm, and concepts a lot of litigators aren't really familiar with — emphasis allocation in a sentence, sentence logic, rhythm. Those are sometimes only familiar to people who've taken a creative writing course or two. So I set out to distill the most helpful tips to make my students ready to write at an elite level. In the process I generated something like 400 pages of slideshows and handouts. Once the course ended, that pretty naturally led me to look at the storehouse I'd created and think about crafting it into a book.
Khurram Naik: Was there a moment when you said, hey, I think I can do this, I'm ready for this?
Ryan McCarl: Back in early 2021, shortly after I concluded that course, that's when I started the elegantlegalwriting.com blog and announced I was going to write the book. I'd had many projects over the years that came and went. My entire life I'd wanted to write a book — ever since I was six years old, or probably earlier, that was my main goal in life in some ways.
Ryan McCarl: But it's a challenging endeavor. It takes enormous focus and discipline. If you're trying to write a book through traditional publishing with a major publisher, it takes years of trial and error — conceptualizing, drafting, getting the proposal accepted, revising. It's a major undertaking. You have to have a pretty deep love for the subject and a willingness to really put a lot into it. I made sure I was ready for that — or as ready as I'd ever be. In designing the course materials and working with my students throughout the semester, I discovered how much and how deeply I cared about these issues, and how much I knew about them. I recognized that I actually had the expertise to contribute positively to an already crowded field, and that because of my eclectic background and broader love of language, I had something new to say in addition to synthesizing the work of others.
Khurram Naik: Any number of lawyers would love to publish a book — hopefully maybe not on legal writing, because we've got a few of those. What tips do you have for someone looking to work with a publisher? You worked with UC Press, which I understand is an academic publisher. Pros and cons of working with an academic publisher? Or more generally, what would you do differently or the same if you were starting over?
Ryan McCarl: University of California Press has been a phenomenal partner from the beginning of this project. Like I said, I tried to write a memoir once, and I wrote part of a book on education back in my mid-twenties after I got a master's in education at the University of Michigan before going to law school. I tried different ways of breaking into traditional publishing that got further along — invited to write a proposal, had a proposal accepted at one point — but then ultimately didn't work out, for one reason or another. A lot of trial and error.
Ryan McCarl: What I'd say is, make sure you are an expert, or can acquire deep expertise, in the topic, and have the motivation to do so. You'll only be able to write something interesting if you have a good handle on what others have already said, so you can build on it, synthesize it, convey it. That's the only hope you have of being innovative and interesting enough to get published by a traditional publisher.
Ryan McCarl: In terms of thinking through the publisher, look at their catalog — do they publish stuff in this area? Sometimes what I encountered from a couple of academic publishers — I only approached about four — was that they had their go-to writer in this area in their catalog, and they said no for that reason. But UC Press was a peer of those same academic publishers and was ready for another book on legal writing, so it worked out. What I had to do to get it accepted began with a query letter, which became a book proposal that was thoroughly vetted. Then I had to very quickly write a manuscript after the proposal was accepted in principle — it's contingent on you producing the manuscript. Then it goes through a peer review process — four anonymous peer reviewers provided detailed feedback. Then there was an internal vote at the press, and even a faculty vote to get the book deal across the line.
Ryan McCarl: It's a very long, arduous process with many opportunities for things to go wrong. You have to have a great deal of resilience and discipline — which is hard to come by when you're a practicing lawyer. I find it hard in particular to work on projects where the payoff is completely contingent — you may end up putting hundreds of hours into something only to have no book at the end of it. But I was able to do it because I love the subject, and because what really worked for me at every stage was recentering on being a teacher. Thinking about helping people rather than ego-driven ideas of having a book. It turns out it's really cool to have a book and it's helped me build a great platform that's still growing quickly. But that wouldn't have carried me through the difficult times of trying to formulate a principle I cover in the book that I just didn't really want to write about at that moment. I knew it was important, I didn't feel like writing about it, and I knew that attitude would show through. To stick through that and come out with something polished — I had to think about helping people and being a teacher.
Ryan McCarl: Once the manuscript was accepted, I actually rebuilt the entire thing. Not one sentence, or maybe a few, from the accepted manuscript ended up in the finished book. Once I knew the book was going to come out and would be under close scrutiny in a crowded market aimed at busy people about writing, no less, I rewrote the whole thing and revised it millions of times with the help of a lot of beta readers.
Khurram Naik: What was the hardest phase of writing the book?
Ryan McCarl: Probably the initial draft, because it just takes so much time. Every stage takes time, but with revision you have some clay to work with and shape. At first it's just you and the blank page. In the process chapters of Elegant Legal Writing, I recommend that litigators start with templates and models — you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you write a discovery motion. But when you're writing a book there's no template. You have to create the skeleton and then fill it by fleshing out ideas.
Ryan McCarl: One thing I found difficult as a young associate, and in other settings, is being asked to write somebody else's ideas and flesh them out. There's a big difference between an idea in your head and an idea that's been fleshed out on paper and communicated to a reader. A lot of times, ideas in your head turn out to be a little nebulous, or more vulnerable or less sound once you actually write them down. That process of struggling to formulate the concept on the page and get the first draft down — that's the hardest part.
Ryan's account of the long, contingent slog of writing a book — recentering on teaching when ego wouldn't carry you — sits next to what Jaimie Nawaday described about writing Disrupting Drinking. Same shape: a serious professional taking on a years-long writing project that the day job doesn't reward. Listen to my conversation with Jaimie Nawaday.
Khurram Naik: By the way, I really loved your Apollo 13 reference — the scene where they say, hey, we've got this square filter that fits a round hole. I always remembered that moment as a kid, just riveting and fascinating. And I like your point — the movie would be a lot less interesting if they just walked in and said, oh, we're going to use the same thing we did before. Even though it's not as interesting to present that way, your final work product should leave some things on the cutting room floor. I really liked that concept.
Khurram Naik: Earlier you were talking about the reasons you wrote the book — the teaching component, your inherent love of good prose — as probably the most potent motivators throughout. Which definitely sounds harrowing. There are multiple points where things could have run asunder. I'd be curious — in what ways has publishing this book benefited your practice?
Ryan McCarl: People are finding my content useful on LinkedIn and on the blog, as well as the book itself. I'm continuing to develop new material for a future book on legal reasoning, and finding ways to expand on, refine, and sometimes tweak recommendations I make in the book. People find the content valuable, and that's motivating to see — the level of engagement on LinkedIn sometimes. Three to six months ago I think I had maybe a thousand followers at most. I wasn't that engaged on LinkedIn, didn't do a whole lot, was never trying to cultivate it. I changed that a little in the ramp-up to the book as a way of promoting it.
Ryan McCarl: What I found — perhaps because of the demise of Twitter and the lack of other well-established social networks that allow people to share text — is that there's a thriving community of lawyers on LinkedIn. They're using it to engage with the profession, share ideas, share tips. Sure, there's promotion of your firm and your practice and your writing, but it's attached to useful content that actually adds value. It's not pure marketing. I found that to be a great way to meet a lot of attorneys and build an audience for the future.
Ryan McCarl: People have taken a great interest in the briefs my firm has written as a result of my writing about legal writing. A lot of people have looked at the complaint we filed in our putative class action against the manufacturers of Stanley tumbler cups, or the amicus brief we wrote on behalf of Coach Jim Harbaugh in the Michigan versus Big Ten litigation back in the fall. Those are already inherently interesting topics, and it adds a bit of extra interest from a lawyer's perspective to find that there's a QR code in the brief — you can scan it and watch an Instagram post that's relevant to the complaint — or what is this font, that's not Times New Roman? Things like that have brought our firm's work to the attention of a much broader audience. My hope is that over time those connections will continue to lead to referrals and to being brought in as counsel whenever there are high-stakes motions to argue or trials.
Khurram Naik: Final question. If you could wave a magic wand and make a word disappear from every brief that's ever written from here on out — you never have to read this word again — what's the word you'd want to make disappear?
Ryan McCarl: Oh. There are so many. "Utterly," probably. I don't know — that could be it. There are so many words we use unnecessarily. I list a lot of the worst offenders in the book. Honestly, "terms and conditions" is another one. It's not a word, it's a phrase, but it kills me. It's so ubiquitous, and it's inherently redundant — every condition is just a form of a term. "Each and every." Maybe the worst offender, as I think of it now, is the practice of writing a number as a dollar sign with a decimal and then spelling it out, as though you didn't understand it the first time around, even though every third grader can read numbers. It's an absolutely baffling tradition. It also increases the odds of creating ambiguity — you're adding another bit of text that could potentially conflict. If you got the number wrong, you've now compounded confusion rather than clarifying.
Ryan McCarl: Whenever you repeat — this is something programmers and web designers know well — if you have repeated text, it's good to have a variable, so when you change one it's fixed everywhere. If you try to repeat the same number twice you've introduced the possibility that, if you got the number wrong, you have to remember to correct it in multiple places. If you're writing it as a digit and as letters, your find-and-replace operation isn't going to find both instances. It's one of those senseless legal traditions. I'm not the first to say it has to go — Bryan Garner has been saying it for decades, as have legal writing professors. But yet it persists. Which goes to show that there are still lessons to be learned in this area — both lessons that have been taught and ones that are fairly new.
Khurram Naik: That should make you feel very comforted as a teacher of legal writing — your job is definitely not over yet. A lot more work to do.
Ryan McCarl: Right. Normally I'd write your good brief for you.
Khurram Naik: This is great. Glad we connected. Congrats on the book, and best wishes on its success.
Ryan McCarl: Thank you so much for your time. Thanks.