Brief-Writing Master Plan

About the Book

As much a sword as a shield, Brief-Writing Master Plan offers an unparalleled and unprecedented curriculum of written advocacy. It’s a sparkling, alchemical blend of doctrine, ethics, and skills. It recruits linguistics, logic, psychology, rhetoric, and semantics into the arsenal of learned advocacy. It contains the rhetorical wisdom of ages, pages, and sages. An advocate files a brief to persuade the judge to decide the lawsuit in favor of the advocate’s client. The keyword is persuade. Too often, advocates forget this and write to please themselves. They address themselves instead of the court. They write in chest-thumping prose and style. Advocates will do well to keep in mind that in advocacy, all that counts is persuading the judiciary. Hence, Brief-Writing Master Plan responds to the judicial wish list for advocates’ writing style and substance. This book is a transformative resource with the potential to accelerate court proceedings by easing judicial burdens and caseloads. A sober reflection on the advocate’s duty to the court, Brief-Writing Master Plan encourages professional candor, decency, and honesty. Writing as taught in this book will surely propel you to the top 1% of the global legal profession and secure your legacy.

About the Author

Chinua Asuzu is Africa’s leading legal-writing scholar. He’s the plain-language maven whose works include Brief-Writing Masterclass; Fair Hearing in Nigeria; Judicial Writing: A Benchmark for the Bench; and Learned Writing. Chinua is the dean of The Write House, the senior partner of Assizes Lawfirm, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria, a Fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies, and a member of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel. A jurisprudent, Chinua teaches legal writing at law firms and law schools, and at private and public forums. Chinua’s expertise spans the gamut of legal writing: academic legal writing, brief-writing, business writing, contract drafting, judicial writing, legislative drafting, and litigation drafting. An upwrite and writeous autodidact, Chinua is all write.