Legal Writing

Are lawyers good writers?

I should apologize, perhaps, for the style of this bill. I dislike the verbose and intricate style of modern English statutes ... You however can easily correct this bill to the taste of my brother lawyers, by making every other word a "said" or "aforesaid" and saying everything over two or three times so as that nobody but we of the craft can untwist the diction, and find out what it means.

Thomas Jefferson (1817)