“Who started the fight…?”

We often find that our clients need to be gently reminded to present their message in plain English, explaining things “as if you would to a friend you ran into in the supermarket.”

Wendell Berry tells of his father, an attorney, and his story about summing up a case for the jury:

"Well, my father was not a bookish man. My mother was a reader, but my father was a lawyer, and so he was under constraint to be clear. He really took pains to understand what it meant to talk to a jury. He used to love the story—I don’t know if it originated with him or not—of some young lawyer asking a witness, “Who instigated the altercation?” And an old lawyer punched him on the shoulder and said, “Ask him who started the fight!” My father insisted on the use of the right words, on calling things by their right names…"