Will Rogers Quotes

The minute you read something and you can't understand it, you can be sure it was written by a lawyer. Then, if you give it to another lawyer to read and he don't know just what it means, then you can be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer. If it's in a few words and is plain, and understandable only one way, it was written by a non-lawyer.

But do not give it to a lawyer's clerk to write, for they use a legal hand that Satan himself will not understand.

Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.

A lot of people probably don't realize how difficult it is to stick to that lawyer speak when you're not a lawyer. I see everyone on 'The Good Wife' - everyone, people who have been there since day one - struggling with that language because it is just not how people talk.

Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?

When I write legally, I try to write very plain, very vanilla, very clear.

I'm not a lawyer, and maybe I should have used more specific legal language.

If there's one thing that lawyers know about reading documents, it's to pay attention to the footnotes. In fact, oftentimes the most important information is buried there.

It always rankled me - in law school and the legal profession - when lawyers would speak to each other in their own exclusive language.

But one type of book that practically no one likes to read is a book about the law. Books about the law are notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. The money is an incentive - the word "incentive" here means "an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don't want to do - to read long, dull, and difficult books.

When you can spell subpoena without thinking about it, that's when you know you've made it.

Jen and I were accustomed to our father's last-will-and-testament diction, and were at times free to interrupt Atticus for a translation when it was beyond our understanding.

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically bewigged.

The first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract-- Look, why should we quarrel about a thing like this? We'll take it right out, eh?

With all due respect to lawyers, it's wonderful that you have this intricate knowledge. You break down words to the nth degree. And sometimes I find it rather disgusting. And it goes on and on.

If a Statute make use of a Word the meaning of which is well-known at the Common Law, such word shall be taken in the same Sense it was understood at the common Law.

No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

The government will certainly decide for itself on whose counsel they will settle the construction of the laws they are to execute. We are to look at the intention of the Legislature, and to carry it into execution while the lawyers are nibbling at the words of the law.

Words, especially those of a constitution, are not to be read with such stultifying narrowness.

Practicing antitrust lawyers and government antitrust lawyers are a kind of priesthood spinning ever more gossamer refinements of the antitrust commandments.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other.

'Crazy' is a term of art; 'Insane' is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble.

That's the best way to practice law, is writing about it and not having to be in the courtroom!

When I was at the Justice Department, there were these people who I called legal Houdinis, who - they would find any law; they would find a loophole and a way around it and often very tendentious and not true, and, you know, these are people who didn't respect the rule of law. But, you know, those people were there.

One of the challenges for lawyers can be explaining, first of all, what the legal issue is and, second, its significance. And both of those are important.