Writing statements for court

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THIS IS WORK IN PROGRESS AND IS INCOMPLETE

Contents 1 A guide to writing statements for court 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Going about writing statements 1.3 Putting it together

A guide to writing statements for court

Introduction

Producing good court documents is hard work. You need to make it easy for the judge to understand your message. It is your job to make it easy to understand, you cannot rely on the readers to put in a lot of effort to get their head round your papers. Judges see many of these things, yours will be one of several in a day, how much interest do they have in your case? They will skim read and so miss things and make assumptions about what they have not seen.

Beware copying the turgid prose produced by many solicitors, this often seems to be more designed to try to convince their customer that matters are complicated and that they need them to produce these unreadable documents. All in the aim of racking up more legal fees.

There are several aspects to writing documents, you need to master them all:

• Writing statements - use of English

• Writing statements - presentation how to structure your document

• Writing statements - different sorts of statements skeleton arguments, initial statement, replies to a statement

• Writing statements - what to say

• Writing statements - organising the bundle

Going about writing statements

The first thing that you need is time, documents prepared in a rush can be hard.

Need: the facts, reviewers, ...

Putting it together

• Writing statements - examples