Obligations of the joint ventures

______(8) is responsible for all operations and decisions of the Joint Venture and will be compensated for providing various services.

VI. CASE STUDY: Read the following text and discuss different types of legal writings. What skills are required for lawyers to make legal writing effective?

Legal Writing: an overview

In many legal settings specialized forms of written communication are required. In many others, writing is the medium in which a lawyer must express their analysis of an issue and seek to persuade others on their clients' behalf. Any legal document must be concise, clear, and conform to the objective standards that have evolved in the legal profession.

There are generally two types of legal writing. The first type requires a balanced analysis of a legal problem or issue. Examples of the first type are inter-office memoranda and letters to clients. To be effective in this form of writing, the lawyer must be sensitive to the needs, level of interest and background of the parties to whom it is addressed. A memorandum to a partner in the same firm that details definitions of basic legal concepts would be inefficient and an annoyance. In contrast, their absence from a letter to a client with no legal background could serve to confuse and complicate a simple situation.

The second type of legal writing is persuasive. Examples of this type are appellate briefs and negotiation letters written on a clients behalf. The lawyer must persuade his or her audience without provoking a hostile response through disrespect or by wasting the recipient's time with unnecessary information. In presenting documents to a court or administrative agency he or she must conform to the required document style.

The drafting of legal documents, such as contracts and wills, is yet another type of legal writing. Guides are available to aid a lawyer in preparing the documents but a unique application of the "form" to the facts of the situation is often required. Poor drafting can lead to unnecessary litigation and otherwise injure the interests of a client.

The legal profession has its own unique system of citation. While it serves to provide the experienced reader with enough information to evaluate and retrieve the cited authorities, it may, at first, seem daunting to the lay reader. Court rules generally specify the citation format required of all memoranda or briefs filed with the court. These rules have not kept up with the changing technology of legal research. Within recent years, online and disk-based law collections have become primary research tools for many lawyers and judges. Because of these changes, there has been growing pressure on those ultimately responsible for citation norms, namely the courts, to establish new rules that no longer presuppose that a publisher's print volume (created over a year after a decision is handed down) is the key reference. Several jurisdictions have responded and many more are sure to follow.

(Retrieved from http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_writing)

REVIEW: UNITS 3-4

I. Check yourself. Do you know:

· What are characteristics of legal language?

· What are conjoined phrases?

· Why are impersonal constructions used in legal communication?

· What is the most dangerous word in lawyer’s vocabulary? Why?

· How innovative is legal language?

· What is the role of ritualistic phrases?

· What are the functions of modal verbs in legal documents?

· What is a term of art?

· Is there any difference in interpreting legal terms by a specialist and a layperson?

· What types of legal writing are there?

II. PROJECT WORK:

· Study the guidelines on writing reports: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/service/ltd/campus/reportwr.pdf

· Write and present a report on one of the following topics:

1. History of legal language

2. Legal phraseology

3. The functions of modal verbs in legalese

4. Sentence structure in legal English

5. Legal metaphors

UNIT 5

Read the text:

THE CREATION, STRUCTURE, AND INTERPRETATION
OF THE LEGAL TEXT

A legal text is something very different from ordinary speech. This is especially true of authoritative legal texts: those that create, modify, or terminate the rights and obligations of individuals or institutions. Such texts are what J.L. Austin might have called written performatives. Lawyers often refer to them as operative or dispositive.