Surprising how low the percentage of "cases filed in California's trial courts result in an appellate disposition" are. Personally I thought it was a low number but something like 2-3%, not in the hundredths of a decimal. Given how low the percentage is it helps me get another reason why casebooks focus so much appellate rather than trial court designs. If a case is heard in appellate court that automatically gives it some importance in the legal world.

Sounds very similar to the phrase "when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail." With very little understanding of the law these unimportant surface-level details are viewed as important, these "post-literate" individuals (as the paper calls them) trying to make these unrelated cases connect to what they are researching. I presume that only through a good understanding of how to properly do legal research that this issue is resolved.

Not only is this story funny but it did get me thinking: What do you do when somebody tries to sabotage your legal research process? Sure, such a process may be unethical and likely to result in those who sabotage their opponents being punished but that does not mean it is not done. If you not only have to deal with the difficulties of legal research but also of somebody trying to prevent you from doing legal research that may be a situation rare enough for few to write about yet risky enough to be concerning for those doing legal research.

Reading this initially this comment really stood out to me because of how odd it was. "What is he talking about? You can easily find a hundred different research outlines with a simple search." I looked up the paper and found out it was published in 1953. These sentences show how different the legal world has become in just 70 years. With the advent of the internet and websites such as Westlaw and Lexis the difficulty of doing legal research has substantially decreased. There was once a time where even the knowledge of how to research was scarce and I am glad that time no longer exists.

I would not be surprised if the lack of an "explicit requirement that the writing be effective or competent" results in the creation of subpar legal writing. Lawyers, wanting to fulfill their CLE requirements, quickly type up something, not with the goal of effectively communicating an important idea but to hit the word count needed to get their CLE credits. This means that pithy writing is at a disadvantage as it fills a smaller portion of the word requirement than something difficult to understand but longer.

I agree with the author's point that legal writing is an essential skill lawyers should know but I am interested in knowing what are the arguments (as well as the people who make said arguments) for legal writing not being important? It seems self-explanatory that as a lawyer it is essential you convey your points effectively else your client receives sub-optimal performance. I looked up "legal writing is not important" in Google to see if I could find any of these arguments against legal writing being important and all I could find were people lamenting the lack of good legal writing rather than anybody arguing against the concept as a whole. It is this lack of push-back against legal writing being important as well as the author's comment that "a search in Arizona for any case using the terms “incomprehensible,” “gibberish,” or “ineffective legal writing,” did not unearth a single case (but maybe my search terms were not effective)" makes me believe this issue of bad legal writing is slightly exaggerated.