How is it possible to make pleadings less dry? By
thinking outside the box.
One way of both amusing yourself and swaying the
judge in your case is to think about some way of
referring to your adversary in your complaint or
response to the complaint that holds them up to ridicule
or sounds like a slur. I don’t mean using an epithet, like
“slimy predatory defendant,” but something more
subtle and more persuasive.
For example, when I was a young lawyer, I
represented a plaintiff in a commercial dispute against a
bank. The majestic sound of the bank’s name—we’ll call
it First Federal Bank of New York—worried the senior
partner on the case, who was concerned that the
defendant would get the upper hand by naming itself
“Federal” for short. So instead, we foreclosed that by
using an acronym. The first time we referred to the
defendant in the complaint, we called it “defendant First
Federal Bank of New York, hereafter ‘FFONY.’ ” The
defendant never caught on to what this sounded like
when pronounced out loud, and referred to itself
throughout the litigation as “FFONY.” I suspect it
colored the court’s view of the parties. Our client won
on a motion for summary judgment.
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