How to Master Legal Paraphrasing: Techniques and Tips

Legal paraphrasing is crucial for lawyers, law students, and anyone working with legal documents. It means to change the structure of the text, without changing its intended meaning.

There are many reasons why legal paraphrasing is a good idea. First, it can make your document easily understandable for everyone. Secondly, it hones your legal writing skills, making you a better professional.

Another motivation behind legal paraphrasing is to tailor the content according to the audience to which it’s delivered. However, this must be done with a lot of care.

In this post, we’ll cover tips and tricks to master legal paraphrasing. We will provide details for everything so that you don’t have to worry about anything!

Ways to Legal Paraphrasing

1. Breaking Down The Original Text

The first step toward mastering legal paraphrasing is to break down the original text. This means understanding the meaning of the legal terms and concepts mentioned to avoid going sideways with your effort.

Identify the main facts used and highlight them. Never change the facts since it can result in a difference between dusk and dawn in a legal document.

Next, analyze the target audience. For whom are you trying to draft this document? Are the readers professionals in the field or law students?

Or are they from different fields trying to understand the law? Ask yourself these questions if you want to master legal paraphrasing.

1. Choosing The Right Words

As we indicated before, legal paraphrasing requires careful synonyms. Unlike other forms of writing, you can’t simply replace a word with another similar-meaning phrase/term for legal documents. This can change the entire meaning and purpose of the work.

Instead, you have to understand the context and historical connotation of each term in law. Only then will you be able to make the word swap successfully and restructure the text, effectively.

To help you out, we suggest using Burton’s legal thesaurus, which is primarily focused on words in law and administration. Take a deep dive into the relevant words for the field and get started with your legal paraphrasing process.

1. Change The Structure Not Meaning

By changing the structure, we mean to alter the length and outlook of sentences. This involves breaking long sentences into short ones and joining short ones to make them longer. However, this must be done in a way that the original intent remains the same.

Example:

Original Text:

Confidentiality Clause: “The Receiving Party further confirms that the confidential information disclosed by the Disclosing Party is confidential and hereby undertakes not to utilize, disclose or communicate the confidential information to any third party without the written consent of the Disclosing Party.”

The above text is critically written for legal professionals since it has terms like ‘confidentiality clause’, ‘propriety’, etc. It is also painstakingly long, making it truly difficult to read or understand for non-professionals.

Paraphrased Version:

Keeping Information Private: “The party receiving sensitive information agrees that this information is important and should be kept private. They promise not to use or share this information with anyone else unless they have written permission from the party who provided it.”

This text is much better for disclosing information to non-legal people like business professionals, artists, etc., without changing the original meaning. Also, notice how the sentences are cut short, avoiding one large mammoth of a line!

1. Maintaining The Legal Integrity Of The Document

While you’re at it, ensure that your legal document has integrity. Meaning that it must correctly cite resources from certified documents, or highly authoritative websites. 

This will make your document look professional, hence, attracting more visitors. Plus, you’ll get scotch-free from any plagiarism accusations, thus protecting your reputation as a practitioner of the law.

Remember, legal paraphrasing doesn’t mean that you change or morph the facts into something you like or don’t like. It only means restructuring your work for either a separate audience or ease of understanding.

In addition to all this, you must include a signed disclaimer in each of your documents saying that “the work is up to the best of your knowledge.” This will save you from any future turbulences while maintaining the integrity of your efforts.

1. Avoiding Over-Complication Of Material

You must avoid overcomplicating the material. As seen in sub-heading 3, the words must be easy to understand if you want to target a wider audience.

No need to add technical jargon or make difficult sentences. Instead, ensure a nice reading rhythm so that people are inclined to finish reading your work.

However, we do understand that professionals and law students are overly exposed to legal terms, ideas, and concepts. Thus, making it very difficult for them to adapt to the needs of the laymen.

That’s why we suggest using the AI paraphrasing tool that makes your writing fluid for the audience, hence, gaining wide attention.

As we can see, the paraphrased version of the input text is much easier to comprehend than the original one. Therefore, you can use this tool to learn how to simplify texts for more clarity and readability.

1. Practicing Regularly

Finally, to master legal paraphrasing, you must practice regularly. Spend time with legal texts and find new approaches to restructure your work. If you’re doing something daily, chances are that you’ll get better and more accurate at it than others.

Besides that, practice will improve your overall legal writing skills, making you an elite-level professional in the future. Thus, it’s crucial to grasp all the tips and techniques that we’ve mentioned so far and apply them in your day-to-day routine.

Our final tip for today would be to seek feedback from other professional lawyers and practitioners. 

Send them your original and paraphrased copies to get honest insights into your work. Then, apply what they’ve suggested to you to polish your crafts.

Final Words

Mastering legal paraphrasing is no joke. It requires a lot of knowledge of a country’s judicial and administration systems. Plus, a lot of writing skills that polish your crafts for success.

However, there are ways in which this difficult process can be simplified. These tips and tricks involve changing the structure of the text without altering its meaning, choosing the right words, and practicing regularly for further improvement.

Moreover, online resources like a legal thesaurus and an AI paraphrasing tool can provide further aid to this process.