Each and Every

Pick one. You do not need both.

Each and every is two words doing the job of one, and it is the tell of a lawyer who was taught to sound like a lawyer instead of taught to write. It travels in a pack. Null and void. Cease and desist. Full and complete. Free and clear. Aid and abet. True and correct. Each pair is one idea wearing two coats, and the second coat is there for the same reason the whole trade wears them. Fear. The fear that one word alone is not lawyer enough to be safe.

It is a costly fear, and the cost is your credibility. Every extra word is a word the jury has to carry, and juries put down what they do not need. Read a page of doublets out loud and listen to it. It does not sound careful. It sounds nervous. It sounds like a man saying a thing twice because he is not sure the first time landed. The witness who repeats himself is the witness you stop believing. A brief that repeats itself reads the same way.

There is a history under this, and it is not a proud one. A lot of the doublets are centuries old, one word from the English and one from the French, kept side by side back when a court held both tongues and nobody wanted to be caught using the wrong one. That world is gone. The reasons are gone. Only the tic survives, copied from form book to form book, from one lawyer who never asked why to the next.

So ask why. Take each pair and try it with one word. Void. Desist. Complete. Clear. Nine times in ten the sentence loses nothing. It gets faster and it gets surer, because a lawyer who writes void instead of null and void is a lawyer who is not afraid of the word he chose. The tenth time, when the two words really do carry two different meanings, keep them both, on purpose, because you can tell the reader exactly why. That is the whole rule. Keep the word that carries meaning. Cut the word that carries fear.

The other side will fill their paper with the pairs. Let them. Every doublet in their brief is a small confession that they are writing to sound safe instead of writing to be understood. You write the other way. One word, chosen, standing on its own. It reads like someone who knows exactly what he means, and that is the person you want the jury to see.