Welcome to LawProse.org

We’re Changing the Way Lawyers Communicate

LawProse is America’s foremost provider of CLE training in legal writing, editing, and drafting. Since 1991 we have conducted public and in-house seminars for more than 100,000 lawyers and judges across the country and abroad — from London and Geneva to Osaka and Bangkok. Our participants have consistently given us ratings that are, as far as we know, unmatched among CLE providers.

All our seminars are conducted by Bryan A. Garner, whose extensive writing on the language of the law led The Green Bag to call him “the leading authority on good legal writing.” A chorus of other publications — including The New York Times, Trial magazine, and Harvard Law Review — have echoed that sentiment.

Garner is editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary and the author of many leading works on legal style, including A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, The Elements of Legal Style, The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style, The Winning Brief, and The Winning Oral Argument. His latest books are Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, cowritten with Justice Antonin Scalia, and Garner on Language and Writing, an anthology published by the American Bar Association.

His magnum opus is the 897-page Garner’s Modern American Usage, published by Oxford University Press. It is widely considered the preeminent authority on questions of English usage.

In addition to the 120-plus seminars Garner teaches each year, LawProse also consults with law firms on revising appellate briefs, with companies and trade associations on translating contracts and other consumer documents into plain English, and with courts and government agencies on projects such as rewriting rules of procedure and simplifying model jury instructions.

Garner’s lively presentations and the depth of his love of language have given LawProse a proven track record: since the beginning, LawProse has provided more CLE training in legal writing than all other providers combined.

The LawProse Philosophy:

  • Our job is to help legal writers earn and maintain credibility.
  • The best legal style is simple and direct.
  • Any writer can learn a simple, direct style — but it takes hard work.
  • To improve, a legal writer must reject many old and meaningless conventions.
  • What distinguishes effective from ineffective legal writers is empathy for the reader.