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BY JACLYN C. CELEBREZZE
Twelve thousand. That’s the word limit for opening briefs in Washington appellate courts.11 www.courts.wa.gov/appellate_trial_courts/supreme/clerks/?fa=atc_supreme_clerks.display&fileID=wordcounts. Figuring the average reader can process 256 words per minute, that’s slightly more than a 45-minute read time.22 Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen & Roy Swartz, Smart Brevity at 124 (Workman Publishing Co. 2022). Per brief. How can you cut through word count and make your writing memorable? Incorporate visuals.
When combined with text, visuals boost comprehension and retention.33 Haig Kouyoumdjian, “Learning Through Visuals,” Psychology Today, July 20, 2012, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/get-psyched/201207/learning-through-visuals. Our brains process images faster than text.44 Id. And images stick: readers recall images more clearly than text.55 William S. Bailey, Show the Brief: Visual Writing Strategies & Techniques at 13 (Trial Guides 2022). In short, visuals bring fuzzy text into focus.
Brainstorming Visual Opportunities
Where do visuals belong in legal writing? Anywhere the audience is making decisions. Across the board, legal documents are rife with opportunities to visually guide your audience. In litigation documents, visuals can focus attention in depositions or simplify data in briefs.66 Id at 270. In transactional documents, visuals can guide audiences through “the complex relationship between various parties and assets, or the structures of a deal.”77 Mireille Butler, “From Brief to Business: How Mastering Brief Writing Techniques is Essential for Successfully Drafting Transactional Documents,” Write to Counsel, Washington State Bar News, July/August 2023, https://wabarnews.org/2023/07/12/from-brief-to-business/.
To identify opportunities, sift back through your prep documents: the doodles and scribbles you’ve created to understand the client’s facts and relevant case law.88 Steve Johansen & Ruth Anne Robbins, “Art-iculating the Analysis: Systemizing the Decision to Use Visuals as Legal Reasoning,” Journal of the Legal Writing Institute 20, 57, 76 (2015). These documents chart the course of your journey from novice to expert, pinpointing the difficult concepts and facts in your client’s matter that may require visualization. Once you’ve identified portions of your case that need clarification or reinforcement, consider your visual options and whether they would bolster your reader’s understanding.
The Visual Legal Universe
The catalog of legal visuals ranges from images and photos to tables, charts, and graphs. For more complex information, consider flowcharts, timelines, Venn diagrams, and infographics. Any or all of these could have a place in a legal document depending upon your audience and purpose.
In their seminal work, “Art-iculating the Analysis: Systemizing the Decision to Use Visuals as Legal Reasoning,” Steve Johansen and Ruth Anne Robbins offer an overview of visual possibilities and when you might choose to create them.99 Id at 63. Johansen and Robbins posit two types of legal visuals: documentary and analytical.1010 Id at 63-64. Documentary visuals help prove that an aspect of a case happened. For example, photographs or images from medical records or police reports. Analytical visuals, on the other hand, help the audience reason and resolve the case. In short, they help the reader connect the facts of the case to the legal sources provided.1111 Id at 64.
Analytical visuals are further broken down into three subsets: organizational, interpretive, and representative.1212 Id at 66-67.
- Organizational visuals help explain the connection between different parties, events, or cases.1313 Id at 67. From basic to complex, a hierarchical chart will quickly orient your audience to your cast of characters and, more importantly, how they’re related to each other. Consider an employment law case requiring a discussion of multiple employees, titles, and job responsibilities. Adding a basic organizational chart can quickly take your readers from company outsiders to company insiders.
- Interpretive visuals uncomplicate the complicated.1414 Id. They explain—and expand—a concept.1515 Id. For example, consider a detailed timeline with 10 entries sprawled across your page. Suddenly, your readers aren’t absorbing dates and data, they’re living it. They feel—and question—the frenetic flurry of activity getting a business started and the stretch of years between launch and IPO in a way that words alone can never convey. Or take a Venn diagram of overlapping retail outlets in a trademark case. Instead of a rote list of vendors, your readers feel Company B’s efforts to get products into every store in their market, the gulf of difference between the industries, and the sliver of overlap in retail outlets.
- Representative visuals are written advocacy’s backup plan.1616 Id. Representative visuals act as a visible reinforcement of your written analysis.1717 Id. Consequently, representative visuals are a great idea for any concepts you need your audience to retain long-term. Think of them as the period on the end of a compelling sentence. Imagine two competing marks shown side-by-side after a written analysis of their similarities and differences in a trademark case or a photo of working conditions after describing them in an employment law claim.
Consider creating a legal visuals checklist for use when drafting. Reviewing and brainstorming will help you identify what’s visually possible. Before creating, though, you’ll need to turn your attention to assessing what’s visually appropriate.
How to Decide When to Include a Visual
Johansen and Robbins advise you to assess your potential visual on the “usefulness continuum.”1818 Id at 69. On one end, a visual is decorative. On the other end, a visual is transformative. Decorative visuals are those that, while interesting, are unhelpful to the reader in making any decisions.
Transformative visuals fundamentally alter a reader’s understanding of the legal issue at hand.1919 Id. The goal is to create and include visuals that are as transformative as possible. Follow these three steps to determine your visual’s location on the continuum.2020 Id.
1. Evaluate the visual’s helpfulness. Does the visual facilitate your reader’s understanding of the topic?
2. Confirm the visual’s advocacy. Does the visual convey the client’s position and match your written legal reasoning?
3. Ensure that the visual is professional, ethical, and cohesive with the rest of your document. Does the visual match the style, tone, and cadence of your document? Ensure that the image is sharp, the aesthetics flow with the written advocacy, and the overall quantity of images is not excessive.
Visuals that pass all three of these tests are transformative and are serious contenders for inclusion. If choosing between visuals, select those that are closer to the transformative end of the spectrum.
Optimize Your Visual
Once you’ve decided a visual is transformative and necessary to your legal writing, take the time to make it shine.
First, consider your audience and balance the volume of visuals to text. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience. Consequently, you’re not going to include all possible visuals; you’ll need to pick and choose.
Second, ensure that your visuals are clear and accurate. A grainy, warped image is unhelpful. Accuracy is also paramount: disclose even minor alterations such as resizing. As Elizabeth Porter underscored in her work, Taking Images Seriously, technology continues to outpace legal practice.2121 Elizabeth G. Porter, “Taking Images Seriously,” 114 Columbia Law Review 1687 (2014). Consequently, we must proceed cautiously, ethically, and with the utmost professionalism as we bring new media into legal practice.2222 Id. at 1776-77. Luckily, William Bailey provides us a guiding light on how to approach image ethics: Assess every image on its accuracy, relevance, and helpfulness to the trier of fact.2323 William S. Bailey, supra note 5, at 136.
Third, ensure that the image and the text are in sync. As Johansen and Robbins note, “[a]nalytical images are at their best when they supplement a text, to distill or reinforce legal analysis.”2424 Steve Johansen & Ruth Anne Robbins, supra note 8, at 57, 91. The caption is an opportunity to prime your reader as to the connection between your image and text. To leverage your caption’s power, be sure to follow these tips2525 William S. Bailey, supra note 5, at 125.:
- Identify people and locations and center them in your story.
- Provide timing of the visual. That could be a date stamp or a timeframe.
- Use one short and conclusive sentence to convey your point to the reader.
- Be transparent about any editing, cropping, or adjustments and why they were done.
- Ensure that your caption doesn’t tell someone how to feel about the image.
Getting Started Creating
Let’s discuss the elephant in the room: visual creation. While today’s law students do draft visuals in the legal writing classroom, many practitioners have never received formal instruction in visual design. If you don’t have a graphic design degree in your back pocket, never fear; tech is here to save the day. And much of it is (surprisingly) user-friendly!
Unfortunately, a comprehensive visual creation program where you can insert your draft notes, describe your audience and goal, and receive recommendations and mockups of multiple, professional, and informative visuals doesn’t exist—yet.
But with the tech sector’s explosive AI growth, that day may arrive shortly. For now, you’ll have to navigate a few different programs to make your legal visuals happen. Here are three recommendations:
- Canva: Perhaps the most cost-effective choice for getting started. The program’s free version offers how-to guides, templates, and a plethora of user-friendly functions.
- Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint: For simple lists, tables, and charts, your Microsoft suite awaits. Before beginning, though, a review of SmartArt’s options is recommended.2626 Choose a SmartArt Graphic: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/choose-a-smartart-graphic-e9a7a134-f8a5-4251-aba2-93f96b88644d.
- TrialLine, Case Timeline, or Timemap: Visual legal writing expert Joe Regalia is a fan of TrialLine for timelines.2727 https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/appellate_advocacy/2019/05/developing-an-eye-for-legal-writing-five-ways-visuals-can-transform-your-briefs.html%20#google_vignette. West’s Case Timeline and Lexis Nexis’s Timemap also have timeline creators.
If time, energy, and resources are barriers, or you find yourself needing more nuance and depth, it may be time to consider an illustrator.2828 William S. Bailey, supra note 5, at 136. An illustrator can be a powerful partner. While you’re the legal expert, the illustrator is the visual expert; working together you can discover what’s possible.2929 Id at 136-137.
Accessibility
As you develop your visuals, don’t forget to ensure audience accessibility. Be sure to include specific information about the visuals in the alt text pane of your document. Delete automated alt text and draft independently. Here are a few best practices: Include any text found in the image, explain any links connected to the image, and end with proper punctuation to ensure the screen reader pauses between the image and the text that follows.3030 www.uwb.edu/marketing-communications/website/accessibility/alt-text.
Conclusion
Making time to assess opportunities for improving your legal advocacy is difficult enough, let alone implementing those opportunities into your day-to-day practice. But incorporating visuals is a rare opportunity to quickly and easily power your written advocacy forward. Need a little more motivation? In Washington courts, “pictorial images (e.g., photographs, maps, diagrams, and exhibits)” are excluded from word limits.3131 www.courts.wa.gov/appellate_trial_courts/supreme/clerks/?fa=atc_supreme_clerks.display&fileID=wordcounts.
About the author
Jaclyn C. Celebrezze is a visiting lecturer at the University of Washington School of Law, where she teaches first-year legal analysis, research, and writing.
NOTES
2. Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen & Roy Swartz, Smart Brevity at 124 (Workman Publishing Co. 2022).
3. Haig Kouyoumdjian, “Learning Through Visuals,” Psychology Today, July 20, 2012, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/get-psyched/201207/learning-through-visuals.
4. Id.
5. William S. Bailey, Show the Brief: Visual Writing Strategies & Techniques at 13 (Trial Guides 2022).
6. Id. at 270.
7. Mireille Butler, “From Brief to Business: How Mastering Brief Writing Techniques is Essential for Successfully Drafting Transactional Documents,” Write to Counsel, Washington State Bar News, July/August 2023, https://wabarnews.org/2023/07/12/from-brief-to-business/.
8. Steve Johansen & Ruth Anne Robbins, “Art-iculating the Analysis: Systemizing the Decision to Use Visuals as Legal Reasoning,” Journal of the Legal Writing Institute 20, 57, 76 (2015).
9. Id. at 63.
10. Id. at 63-64.
11. Id. at 64.
12. Id. at 66-67.
13. Id. at 67.
14. Id.
15. Id.
16. Id.
17. Id.
18. Id. at 69.
19. Id.
20. Id.
21. Elizabeth G. Porter, “Taking Images Seriously,” 114 Columbia Law Review 1687 (2014).
22. Id. at 1776-77.
23. William S. Bailey, supra note 5, at 136.
24. Steve Johansen & Ruth Anne Robbins, supra note 8, at 57, 91.
25. William S. Bailey, supra note 5, at 125.
26. Choose a SmartArt Graphic: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/choose-a-smartart-graphic-e9a7a134-f8a5-4251-aba2-93f96b88644d.
28. William S. Bailey, supra note 5, at 136.
29. Id. at 136-37.
30. www.uwb.edu/marketing-communications/website/accessibility/alt-text.