Quote Originally Posted by CatsinDenver
So true! For several years, I taught legal research and writing to first-year law students. I was shocked to discover how many people managed to get through grade school, high school, and college without ever learning how to use a comma! I tried to persuade them that many judges do, in fact, understand spelling and grammar and are likely to find a legal brief that's full of errors in basic English to be less than convincing. But I met with mixed success.

One law student actually told me that he didn't need to be able to write correctly because he'd have a secretary to take care of that! I asked him how he could expect the U.S. educational system to have taught his secretary how to write when it had failed to teach him how to do it.
That's why my boss asked me to take a legal writing class many years ago. Now I'm a paralegal and that's exactly what I do. I'm the one who's supposed to catch the attorneys' poor grammar and spelling. English and spelling were always my strong areas anyway, so it's not a big deal. It just shocks me to see the quality, or lack thereof, of writing we receive from other law firms.