Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation’s Top Advocates
Ross Guberman
Oxford University Press 2011
As someone who not only engages in the practice of appellate advocacy but who also has a great love for the practice, I find that my shelves are replete with books relating to both written and oral advocacy. I buy those books in the hope that I will pick up a trick or two worth using in my practice—and, to a greater or lesser extent, I generally get my money’s worth. Reading the advance press on Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation’s Top Advocates, which promised to be a book full of such tricks, I rushed online to order a copy. It’s one thing to pick up some tricks from a law professor who teaches legal writing; it’s another to pick them up from Seth Waxman or Carter Phillips.
Of course, the “tricks” are filtered through an author. Ross Guberman is the president of Legal Writing Pro, a company that appears to be a competitor of Bryan Garner’s Law Prose. Mr. Guberman has an impressive academic background, having studied at Yale, the Sorbonne, and the University of Chicago Law School. I certainly cannot argue with his selection of lawyers from whose works he illustrates his principles of legal writing—they are all truly among the nation’s top advocates.