Join Kaplin Stewart’s Virtual CLE: “Ten Tips for Clear and Direct Legal Writing”

5/24/2022 | Events & Seminars, News & Resources

Wednesday, June 15, 2022
8:30 am – 10:45 am

In this seminar, attorneys will learn how to write with clarity in a variety of legal documents, such as client letters, memos, emails, and legal briefs.  

“Ten Tips for Clear and Direct Legal Writing” Description

This seminar features 10 tips to make your legal writing, regardless of the context or audience, clear and concise. Ben uses both good and not-so-good examples from inside and outside the legal world in this interactive seminar.

• • Be Attractive: Document Design
  • Be a Good Host: The Importance of Context
  • Be Calm: Understatement and Simplicity
  • Be Brief: Concision
  • Be Strong: Powerful Nouns and Verbs
  • Be Emphatic: Avoiding bold, italics, underlining, AND ALL CAPS.
  • Be Stylish: Sentence Variety
  • Be Orderly: Logical Organization
  • Be Musical: Writing that Sounds Good
  • Be Careful: Revision and Proofreading Techniques

Ethics: 2 credits pending.

Instructor:

Ben Opipari is the founder of Persuasive Matters, delivering writing seminars and coaching to law firms worldwide to help them perfect the art of clear and direct writing. From 2006 to 2011, Ben was the writing instructor at Howrey LLP, a worldwide litigation firm. There, he developed and implemented a writing curriculum for the firm’s 700 attorneys through seminars and coaching. Before coming to Howrey, he was the director of the writing center at Colgate University, where he taught in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric and trained students and faculty to be writing coaches.

Ben has been an educator for over twenty-five years (except for a stint in radio) on the middle school, high school, college, and corporate levels. And all this time, he’s been a coach in some form: he was also a head high school track coach for ten years, coaching ten All-Americans and many state champions.

Ben holds a Master of Arts in Teaching from American University and a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from The Catholic University of America. He remains active as a writer, publishing in both the legal writing field and his doctorate field. Ben is a contributor to the health and the music sections of the Washington Post, and he also runs the music website Songwriters on Process, where he interviews songwriters about their creative process. He’s also co-authoring a memoir with a prominent hard rock guitarist, slated for publication in 2023.

Ben used to be a volunteer EMT in upstate New York and Montgomery County, Maryland and misses it very much.

Ben lives in the Washington, DC area with his wife and four children. He can be reached at ben@persuasivematters.com.