Over a year ago – before I had even started my 1L year – I wrote my first post for the Impact Blog, which was largely about whether I felt moving from creative writing to law would be a smooth transition. With three semesters now under my belt (and the weariness to show for it), I thought it would be fun to revisit that topic and see just how accurate my predictions were.  

My perhaps overly-optimistic younger self believed that law school could be a progression of the creative writing skills I developed in college; that much of what I learned would carry over into the legal world. While that belief wasn’t 100% false, it turned out to be a bit more complicated than that. 

One of my undergrad creative writing professors always said “let the reader’s mind do the work.” There is a time and a place for flowery language, but generally, being overly descriptive crowds the page and can often confuse the audience. I learned that I was better off giving just enough detail to get my idea across, and from there, the reader would subconsciously use their imagination to paint the rest of the picture. 

As it turns out, legal writing is the exact opposite. Nothing can be open-ended; the legal writer’s job is to ensure that the reader’s mind does as little work as possible. Stating the obvious and frequent repetition – often enemies of the creative writer – are some of the legal writer’s strongest allies. Last semester, one of my professors asked all of the former creative writing majors to raise their hands, then quipped, “don’t worry – we’ll beat that out of you.” 

Even writing in litigation, which typically has more room for creativity than transactional work, operates under strict constraints. I felt confident going into my 1L law practice course given my experience with writing, but it wound up being a challenging class for me. I had to forget much of what I had learned and train myself to think and write in a completely new way. 

All that being said, I was not completely lost at sea. At its core, writing is about word choice, and legal writing is no exception. In fact, words can have even greater ramifications in the context of law because they can have legal definitions that differ from their everyday use. My past experiences as a writer – stressing over every sentence – helped me with choosing words carefully and distilling dense legalese. Moreover, all writers – consciously or not – borrow from other authors. In persuasive legal writing, the more you ground your argument in precedent and cite similar cases, the stronger it becomes. 

Moving from prose to precision is something I’m sure many students with backgrounds like mine will struggle with when coming to law school. While there are certainly a lot of adjustments, I still believe that a background in creative writing can provide a strong foundation for legal work. 

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Eddie Godino is a second-year student at BC Law. Contact him at godinoe@bc.edu.