Friday, May 04, 2007

Issue statements: example from State Bar of Texas

Question Presented:

May a lawyer who represents a client in a contingent fee personal injury case enter into an agreement with a lending company owned by non-lawyers under the terms of which the lending company would agree to reimburse the lawyer for litigation expenses in the case as incurred and the lawyer would agree to repay, in the event of a recovery in the lawsuit, the amounts advanced plus a funding fee equal to a fixed percentage of any amount recovered in the case but subject to an agreed maximum?

Op. No. 576, December 2006, published at 70 Tex. B. J. 456 (May 2007).

My comments:

This is a single sentence of 88 words with a Flesch score of 0 and a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 16. But who cares about any of that? It's just hard to read and understand. I now take it through three revisions: (1) correctness, (2) sentence length, and (3) comprehensibility.

(1)
May a lawyer who represents a client in a contingent[hyphen]fee[comma] personal[hyphen]injury case enter into an agreement with a lending company owned by non[no hyphen]lawyers[comma] under the terms of which the lending company would agree to reimburse the lawyer for litigation expenses in the case as incurred[comma] and the lawyer would agree to repay, in the event of a recovery in the lawsuit, the amounts advanced plus a funding fee equal to a fixed percentage of any amount recovered in the case but subject to an agreed maximum?

(2)
A lawyer represents a client in a contingent-fee, personal-injury case. The lawyer seeks to enter into an agreement, with a lending company owned by nonlawyers, in which the lending company would agree to reimburse the lawyer for litigation expenses in the case as incurred. The lawyer would agree to repay, in the event of a recovery in the lawsuit, the amounts advanced plus a funding fee equal to a fixed percentage of any amount recovered in the case but subject to an agreed maximum. Is this agreement appropriate?

22 words per sentence, Flesch score of 42, and grade level of 13.

(3)
A lawyer represents a client in a contingent-fee, personal-injury case. The lawyer arranges for a lender owned by nonlawyers to reimburse the lawyer for litigation expenses as they are incurred. If the lawyer recovers money in the case, the lawyer will repay the amounts advanced plus a funding fee that is a percentage of the recovery; the funding fee is subject to a maximum. Is this agreement appropriate?

17 words per sentence, Flesch score of 50, and grade level of 9.5.

All my work here is open to criticism because this is a legal opinion directed at lawyers. But I say why not write plainly and clearly and readably all the time?

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