Show the Brief: Visual Writing Strategies and Techniques

Take a creative practicing attorney and brilliant teacher of trial practice, with important ideas about how to be better, and you get William Bailey. In Show the Brief, he has written an exceedingly useful manual on how, in pleadings, to use visuals like police reports, diagrams, documents, or photographs. Drawing on scientific work in psychology, neuroscience, communication, and other fields, his ideas are likely to change the way lawyers communicate and make them vastly better advocates.

Legal writing is notoriously dull, detailed, and difficult to read. But it need not be. In this ingenious and practical book, Bailey shows lawyers how to revolutionize their writing to engage the reader and win the case. Using real-life examples, he demonstrates the power of images, point of view, and narrative in everyday brief-writing. ‘Briefs are our best shot to tell the judge why we should win,’ says Bailey, explaining how his evidence-based method of showing the story will give the trier of fact a superior understanding of the legal issues. Just as sharp trial lawyers have integrated technology in the trial of their cases, so too will visionary lawyers appreciate how Bailey’s methodology will transform their written submissions to the court. I love this book!

Show the Brief delivers an invaluable lesson on every page. Drawing on social science, literature, film, and the author’s personal experience, this book will help lawyers at all levels find success through becoming better communicators.

Much of advocacy is simply teaching; teaching the judge or jury the facts, from your point of view, that you want them to understand. For over a hundred years, textbooks of all sorts have had photos, diagrams, and charts. Why not briefs?… [Show the Brief] challenges many unexamined assumptions about what makes a good brief or good legal argument. It will change your ideas about what is possible and what is persuasive. It is like giving a painter a whole new color that’s never been used or viewed by anyone before. This new color is powerful, unusual, and unfamiliar. Using this new color will require you to develop new skills. You will literally start to think differently as you call upon different parts of your brain to join in your advocacy.... I hope you are as excited by the creative possibilities as I am. Before there was writing, we had only oral advocacy. Then, of course, came written advocacy. Now, you have the chance to be one of the early pioneers in visual advocacy. Welcome.

Almost every other field has long been using visuals to make their written words more readable, clearer, and focused; it’s past time lawyers do the same with briefs. This book gets you there. Bailey’s guidance is so good, so accurate, and so easy to use that you’ll find yourself critiquing the very examples he uses to illustrate his points! Thorough and wise on the relevant law, and pitch-perfect with its principles of visual perception, Bailey’s unique and informed book will skyrocket the success odds of your briefs, earn you the gratitude of judges for making their jobs so much easier, and—proving how well Bailey’s guidance works—dismay your opposing counsels. Along the way, you’ll learn the fundamental, usually ignored, and long-proven differences between effective and ineffective visuals for trial as well as for briefs. No more unknowingly accepting the usual mediocre and often counterproductive output of most exhibits companies. Bailey welcomes you with open arms to this obviously needed approach.

‘The best teacher usually wins.’ That is professor William Bailey’s critical lesson in Show the Brief, and he proves that precept in this enormously instructive book. Page by page, he teaches lawyers how to master the craft of visual instruction in both brief writing and courtroom advocacy. To prove the power of visuals, he deploys visuals—dozens of photos, computer animations, Google maps, pie graphs, bar graphs, line graphs, and diagrams, all beautifully reproduced in these pages. Professor Bailey shows that such visuals, when thoughtfully designed and skillfully wielded, prove far more persuasive to judges and jurors than words alone. Drawing on four decades of courtroom advocacy and hard-won wisdom, and flashing his native wry wit, professor Bailey offers would-be courtroom wizards the secrets of his magic.

This book will be of huge interest and appeal to legal writing professors, especially those who teach advanced legal writing, persuasive writing, and trial advocacy. The book is fun and easy to read and has a huge array of practical examples and advice that will benefit all those who want to improve their students' persuasive skills through the use of visual legal writing.