When you write that something is clear, you are telling the reader you cannot show it. The word is a confession. Strike it.
Open any weak brief and count the tells. "Clearly, the driver was at fault." "Obviously, the defendant knew." "Plainly, this was foreseeable." Every one of those words is doing the opposite of its job. The writer reached for the adverb because the point was not clear, and hoped the word would carry what the facts would not.
A reader is not persuaded by being told to be persuaded. Tell a skeptical man that something is obvious and you have handed him a reason to disagree, because now proving you wrong is a way for him to feel smart. The judge who reads "clearly" hears "I have no case on point." The juror who hears "obviously" wonders why you are pushing so hard on a thing that should not need pushing.
Here is the test. Take the sentence with "clearly" in it and read it again without the word. If the sentence still stands, you never needed the word. If the sentence falls down without it, then the word was propping up a claim you have not proven, and no adverb can prop up a claim. Either way, the word goes.
What replaces it is the fact. Do not write that the driver clearly had time to stop. Write that he had a second and a half and an open line of sight, and let the reader do the arithmetic. Do not write that the danger was obvious. Show the thing that made it obvious and let the word form in the reader's own head. A conclusion the reader reaches for himself is one he will defend. A conclusion you announce for him is one he will test.
This is not a rule about elegance. It is a rule about power. The strongest sentence in a brief names a fact and stops. It does not editorialize, it does not plead, it does not tug the reader's sleeve. It states what happened and trusts the record to do the rest. Strike "clearly," strike "obviously," strike "plainly," and pull their cousins "very" and "extremely" while you are in there. What is left is shorter, colder, and harder to answer. That is the whole idea.
