Ever sat down to write a brief, only to realize you don’t really know what you want to say? This episode spotlights the single most common obstacle for law students and new lawyers: getting caught up in sounding good before actually having a clear argument.

Steve Palmer reflects on the crucial—but often overlooked—skills needed for effective writing and communication, both inside and outside the legal profession.

Drawing from more than three decades of experience mentoring young lawyers and law students, Steve Palmer breaks down why the key to clear, persuasive arguments isn’t about fancy language or style, but about knowing exactly what you’re trying to say.

He shares personal stories, lessons from his own legal journey, and timeless advice from legendary advocates, all designed to help you sharpen your communication—whether you’re crafting a legal brief, delivering a closing argument, or making your case over appetizers at a bar.

Key Takeaways:

• Always identify what you want to say before writing—don’t focus on style or sounding impressive first 01:18, 02:19
• Use outlining and note-taking methods to organize your thoughts clearly 05:00
• Practice communicating your argument verbally before putting it on paper 07:33
• Style and ornaments in writing come after a strong message is established 06:32
• Confidence in speaking and writing comes from message clarity, not just delivery 10:06

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the most common mistake law students make in legal writing? - Many try to focus on style or wording before clarifying exactly what they want to argue, leading to unclear writing 01:18.
2. Why is it important to know your argument before you start writing? - Without knowing your argument, you can’t write persuasively or effectively because you lack direction 02:19.
3. What practical steps can help clarify an argument before writing? - Several points were raised, including using note cards, creating outlines, and verbally explaining your thesis before drafting 05:00.
4. Does presentation style matter as much as content in legal argumentation? - Knowing your message is more important than presentation, as delivery naturally improves when your argument is clear 10:19.
5. How can young lawyers become more confident in their courtroom delivery? - Confidence comes from being certain about your argument and message, rather than focusing on perfect phrasing or delivery technique 10:34.

Submit your questions to www.lawyertalkpodcast.com.

Recorded at Channel 511.

Stephen E. Palmer, Esq. has been practicing criminal defense almost exclusively since 1995. He has represented people in federal, state, and local courts in Ohio and elsewhere.

Though he focuses on all areas of criminal defense, he particularly enjoys complex cases in state and federal courts.

He has unique experience handling and assembling top defense teams of attorneys and experts in cases involving allegations of child abuse (false sexual allegations, false physical abuse allegations), complex scientific cases involving allegations of DUI and vehicular homicide cases with blood alcohol tests, and any other criminal cases that demand jury trial experience.

Steve has unique experience handling numerous high publicity cases that have garnered national attention.

For more information about Steve and his law firm, visit Palmer Legal Defense.

Copyright 2026 Stephen E. Palmer - Attorney At Law

Mentioned in this episode:

Circle 270 Media Podcast Consultants

Circle 270 Media® is a podcast consulting firm based in Columbus, Ohio, specializing in helping businesses develop, launch, and optimize podcasts as part of their marketing strategy. The firm emphasizes the importance of storytelling through podcasting to differentiate businesses and engage with their audiences effectively. www.circle270media.com

All right, LawyerTalkPodcast.com we are off the record, on the air.

It's been a while since I've done a they don't teach you that in law

school segment, but I guess this may not even be that.

Maybe, maybe you decide. So here's the deal. I have a

young first year law student working for me now and

she was working on a writing project. She's trying to figure out what she's going

to write and she started asking me some questions. And it got me

thinking about this. I don't know if there's

maybe outside law inside. It really doesn't matter. So this isn't even just geared towards

law, but I want to give my 2 cents or maybe 3

cents or 4 cents or maybe even a dime, I don't know on how

to write. And by right I mean like right. And maybe it's better than that,

maybe broader than that, how to communicate. And here's what I've seen

in my humble 31 years of doing

this job, which involves a lot of writing

and helping a lot of younger lawyers and law students who work for me do

writing projects. The first thing that I've seen that I notice

when people are struggling is they're worried about they got the cart before

the horse or their ass backwards or the chicken before the egg, or the

egg before the chicken, whatever it is, they're trying to

figure out how they're going to say it. In other words, they want to

sound good. They want to look, they want it to read well, they want it

to read like some sort of Justice Scalia

or Dickensian, maybe not Dickens, because nobody knows what the hell he's saying. But

I mean, you do read it. It's still good. But anyway,

they want it to sound good. And the problem is

they got the. It's a chicken and egg problem because you first have to know

what you're going to say before you know how you're going to say it. Now

that may make some sense, but I think all too often people skip that and

they start writing before they know what they're going to say. And if you don't

know what you're going to say, there's no way you're going to say it well

because you don't know what you're saying in the first place. So usually what I

this is the first question. Believe me, I have to follow these rules too, because

I stumble into this problem even today. I'm going to go write a brief upstairs.

I'm working on a writing project it's sort of outside my normal. Like, there's

some stuff I just have canned. I can just crank it out. But this is

a unique issue, and I had to stop and do this. I had to

figure it out because I started to write and I'm like, hold on a second.

What am I trying to argue here? And that's the question that I ask myself.

That's the question I ask anybody who's trying to. Who's struggling with what to say

or what they're writing and how they're going to do it. And this, by the

way, it's not just writing. This is when I give

closing arguments or I give a talk in court, or even when I

talk to clients or I talk to whoever. I think we all sort of do

this implicitly, but something about the process of pulling up your laptop

and starting to type, and maybe that device is the problem. I'll

get to that in a second. It makes you sort of. It changes your mindset,

and I don't think it has to. So the first question I ask when

anybody's struggling is, what are you trying to say here? And they

look at me sort of strange, and if I get that look and

I'm joking, I'm not beating people up, but I say, you don't even know what

you're trying to say. And then you get the smile back, and they're like, yeah,

you're right. All right, let's figure out what you're trying to say. What's the

argument? And when you get people. And this

is why the Socratic method, meaning question and answer method in law school, is

so helpful, because through a question and answer with somebody, I

figure out what my argument's going to be. I figure out what I'm going to

argue to the jury, when I'm going to argue to a judge, what I'm going

to argue to. In

a brief, I'm writing because I first dialogue it out, we

debate it out, and I can then figure out what my

argument is. Oh, you're trying to argue this. And when that breakthrough

happens, when the young lawyer or law student or even

I get to the point where I can tell you what my argument is,

I. I almost. I say the same thing. Okay, that's great. Just go write that.

And sometimes it's like two sentences, and they've come to me first with

two pages, and, well, you get the answer.

Well, that's awful simple. Yes, because it's really simple. Just say,

write what you're trying to argue. So if the argument Is this. Just write that.

And then later on you can go back and fill it

in or do whatever. Now how do you. What's a good. Sometimes it's

even. It's really difficult to get to the answer to that question. What are you

trying to say? And especially in law, because you get all sorts of stuff. Stuff.

And there's lots of legal standards and there's variables and there's whatever. When I was

a kid, back in my day, I had a composition

teacher. His name was Roy Merchant, Mr. Merchant. And he was a quirky fellow.

He's since deceased. But, you know, I learned how to do

term papers or research papers the old fashioned way. You go to

library, you get these little three by five cards and you start taking notes on

the cards and you pick topics that you're going to take notes about. So I

did one on the history of the Olympics and I had to figure out the

first Olympics or something. And so you write down the date. And then I would

start. I would get to all my sources, start writing these cards. And then on

my desk, you stack notes on all the topics together. So you got a note

on this, you're going to put it with this, a note on this, you're going

to put it with this, a note on. And then you take all those notes

and you think, all right, now I'm going to create an outline. I'm going to

say, all right, the first thing I'm going to talk about my thesis is this.

I'm going to talk about this topic, this topic, this topic. And guess what? The

research is done. All I have to do is take these note cards and turn

that into prose or write it out and I'm done.

If everybody still. And that's why I said I was going to get back to

this device. People open this and they just start composing. And

I can do that now on lots of stuff, but not all stuff.

On lots of stuff. I can do it because it's up here already. I've got

that playbook in my head because I've run the play a thousand times. But if

it's new, I still do this. I did it the other day in this. Somebody

hired me to do some work on, like I said, an area that's outside my

business or outside my normal practice. And I had to do that. I had to

go through, I read all the cases, I hand wrote what I

thought those cases said. I brought in all the different

nuances, all the different. And then I categorized it,

and then I put an outline together on paper. And guess what? Lo and behold,

I figured out what I was trying to say, and then I could

go and say it. Now, when are we.

That's when it gets fun, when you know what you're trying to say

and then you get it on paper, then you can go back and then

you can tweak how you're saying it. We are. Justice

Scalia was a phenomenal writer, a great writer. And there's lots of great writers

in novels, in Hollywood, on movies. There's lots of great writers.

Dickens, Shakespeare. Go read some of that stuff and really take it in.

But they first knew what they were trying to say, and then they add the

flower to it later. I used to play. I said used to. I probably still

could, but I haven't picked it up. I used to play classical guitar. I

was learning these box suites. And I had a phenomenal

guitar instructor. I was an adult, but this is just going back a few years.

And he wouldn't let me play the trills

or what they call the ornaments in the music until I could play

the music and understood the music, wouldn't let me add the flower.

No, you know, you don't get the gingerbread until you can build the house.

Or, you know, you don't get to put the icing on the gingerbread house until

you build the house. You can't ornament it up

until you have the foundation. So I had to learn the piece. Not only learn

the piece, but actually understand what.

How it should be, how I maybe, who knows how it should be expressed. I

wasn't there when Bach was around, but how I wanted to express

it, and then, and only then, can you add the ornament

to it. Writing is the same way. So look, if you're

struggling with something to write, follow, or what to argue, if you

can't tell your buddy over a drink or over

breakfast or over a plate of appetizers at

a bar, you can't argue the case. You

can't argue your point yet. You need to be able to articulate what you're going

to say before you even begin to think how it's going to sound or how

it's going to look or how you're going to actually employ it, because you have

to be. And here's the other thing. When you do this, when

you actually get to the point where you know what you're trying to say, it's

easy. It's easy. And most of the time, it doesn't matter how you

say it. One more story. Jerry Spence. It's Funny. People

don't even know. I'm getting old. But anyway, there's a guy named Jerry Spence. He's

a famous lawyer. He represented, I think, Karen

Silkwood, some other really famous cases.

He wrote a book called how to Win an Argument. Every time

I read his book, maybe it was a different book of his I read, but

I read the book, and it was sort of an interesting premise. You win an

argument by defining what the argument is, finding a position that you can

defend, and then staying within your lanes. That's oversimplified, but it's

interesting. But he tells a story. He talks

about what he thought in the moment

and what other people said in the moment was his best closing

argument of all time. In other words, he stood in front of a jury, he

delivered a closing argument, drew people to tears.

Perhaps just everybody was riveted.

Clarence Darrow is another famous lawyer that could do this. Just a

phenomenal speaker, and

wins the case. He gets the transcript of it. You know, maybe

I'm embellishing. So whoever's read the book, fix it. I don't care. But the

story would go something like this. Perhaps you're so happy with what you

did, you're so proud of your or your closing argument

that you want to order it. So I've done this before. Not this

exactly, but I've tried cases that I ended up

losing, but I thought there was a part of it I did that I really

liked, and I get the transcript. I'm going to do the appeal. We're working on

it, somebody else's or whatever. And you read it and you're like,

holy crap, that's awful.

That's terrible. Look at that. I missed this word. I

skipped a word. I used the wrong word. I stuttered, I stammered,

I lost my way. I've done it here, talking in this podcast, probably a few

times. Yet at the time when Spence

delivered his argument, it was awesome. You

know why? It's because he knew what he was trying to say. He understood the

message he was trying to impart, and he did it. He did it with the

way he was saying it. He did it with his body language, and maybe

he even kept it really simple. And then you find out that how you say

it is less important than you think it is. So people have the

chicken before the egg, the cart before the horse, whatever cliche

you want to use, you first know what you're trying to say.

Whatever you produce your writing, your argument, your speech

is going to be infinitely better. And the other thing that's going to happen to

you is this. You're not going to be as nervous when you're standing up,

delivering the message, because it doesn't matter how you say it. People get nervous about

how they're saying it. But if you know what you're going to say and you

just get up, you see these guys at town hall meetings just get up and

they're like. Because they know that they're passionate, they

know what their argument is, and they know what they're going to say. So it

almost always sounds good. All right. I don't know what any of the point of

this was, but I hope it was helpful. If you've got something you want me

to cover in life, in law or Otherwise, go to

LawyerTalkPodcast.com Send me a message or leave it. Right.

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