by Suzanne Mathews

Created on: June 06, 2010   Last Updated: July 05, 2010

Informative legal writing requires the author to provide information that can be relied upon by the reader. To insure the information can be relied upon, the author should include legal sources of authority related to the topic. These sources of authority could derive from judicial decisions, statutes, constitutions and administrative regulations. This guide will provide useful tips to writing reliable, informative legal articles by using in-text citations and references.  

According to the American Bar Association (ABA), it is against ABA model rule 5.5 to offer legal advice or practice law, unless you are a licensed attorney providing legal service within your jurisdiction. With that being said, a legal article can be written to provide informative legal information without offering legal advice. Offering legal advice is an act of suggesting to the reader how to act upon a particular legal situation; for example, “you will win your legal case if you do this or that”.  Similarly, informative legal article should not include personal opinions as these opinions may be misunderstood by the readers as legal advice or fallacy of the law. Whereas, informing the reader about common knowledge of particular laws or statues is not considered unauthorized practice of law (UPL).

Writing informative articles, particularly topics related to the law, requires the author to provide to the reader a source from which the information came, otherwise known as in-text citations.  In addition, an author should use clear examples related to the legal topic. Suppose we want to provide information about the laws related to “driving under the influence”; and we proclaim that in our state “the law provides that a person operating a vehicle with BAC of .08 or higher is considered driving under the influence”. While this statement may be true, it does not specify which state we are referring or a citation of the law. To be clear the author must include the specific state and cite the law for that state; doing so provides authority to your statement. Likewise, when abbreviating words such as “BAC” inform the reader what the abbreviation means. A clear example would be written as follows,  

“The law, AR Code Title 5, Ch. 65, for the state of Arkansas, provides that a person operating a vehicle with the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level of .08 or above is deemed to be driving under the influence (DUI)”.

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