The Appellate Record : Texas Appellate Lawyer & Attorney Kendall Gray for Fifth Circuit & Supreme Court Appeals

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In my last post, I summarized the Fifth Circuit's new MGE UPS Systems opinion.  The substance is sound and important to civil lawyers, but I've got a bone to pick with the author.

This legal writing rant could be brought to you by Radio Shack and its series of Tour de France Alphonse commercials with Lance Armstrong.  The one I have in mind is, "LOL," where Lance sets out the rules of engagement:

First things first: No man over the age of 30 will EVER use emoticons. 

And poor Alphonse replies, "LOL, Lance," to which Lance gives his steely glare: 

Whoa.  LOL??!!!  Don't make me get off this bike.

Not that I am the Lance Armstrong of anything, but I propose a new rule:

No one with a law degree will EVER make up his or her own acronyms.

I've heard judges complain about briefing in which every corporation and affiliate bears its own inscrutable acronymic reference.  And the complaints are well taken.  You shouldn't need a score card or an answer key to tell who did what to whom. If one has to either memorize new abbreviations or flip back and forth to the definitions, the odds of engaging that reader are markedly diminished.

But the same can be said for opinions that are an alphabet soup of abbreviations.  Why not give parties and statutes names that make intuitive sense? (And secondarily, why can't companies have names instead of alphanumeric hieroglyphic identifiers??)  In the first pages of MGE, for example, we are treated to:

• MGE
• GE
• GE/PMI
• DMCA

And this opinion is not even a big offender.  But all one really needs is MGE and Power Management.  Because of all the extras, I can tell you that I was not LOL-ing or ROTFLMAO-ing or even LQTM-ing while I was trying to learn the technology involved in the dispute.  Several times, I was all, like, "BRB--I have to turn back to the first page to figure out what's going on here."

Simply stated, neither briefs nor opinions ought to read like Bankruptcy Plans or Offering Memoranda.  (Bankruptcy Plans and Offering Memoranda likely ought not be the way they are either, but that's a post for another day.)

Now, I'm not condemning acronyms that everybody knows already, e.g., IRS, NASA, USA, AT&T or ERISA.  Those kinds of acronyms aid comprehension because they already contain meaning.  Because they aid in precision and understanding they are good. 

But excessive use of made up acronyms rather than just calling the parties "Power Maintenance" or "Plaintiff" violates Kendall's Prime Directive Of Legal Writing:

No matter what Bryan Garner and the Bluebook say, anything that interferes with understanding is bad.

So, please.  The life you save may be your own:

No one with a law degree will EVER make up their own acronyms.

Don't make me get off this bike.