Let’s call the parties their names, not procedural labels like Appellant, Applicant, Claimant, Defendant, Petitioner, Plaintiff, or Respondent.
“The procedural titles change throughout the case, but the names remain the same. Using names also humanizes your client—even corporate ones.” Mark P. ‘30 Suggestions to Improve Readability, or How to Write for Judges, Not Like Judges,’ 21 judgepainter.org/publications.
Mobil or Ojielo sounds better and is more rememberable than “Respondent/Applicant” or “7th Defendant/Respondent.” Your narrative will be more vivid and more memorable when you use real names.
Procedural labels like Appellant, Applicant, Claimant, Defendant, Petitioner, Plaintiff, and Respondent “dehumanize your narrative and make it more abstract and harder to follow.” Bryan A. Garner, The Winning Brief: 100 Tips for Persuasive Briefing in Trial and Appellate Courts, 3rd ed. (OUP, 2014), 245.
Joe R. Greenhill was a Texas Supreme Court judge. After a quarter of a century on the bench, he wrote, “It is easier for us [judges] … to remember the parties by name …. I have difficulty in remembering who is petitioner, respondent, appellant, relator, and the like.” Joe R. Greenhill, ‘Advocacy in the Texas Supreme Court,’ Texas Bar Journal (June 1981), 624, 628 (italics in original).
When several parties are aligned on either side, then you can label them Appellants, Defendants, Respondents, etc. In the body of your work, you can distinguish aligned parties by referring to 1st Defendant Dangote, 3rd Defendant Sheraton, etc. When discussing another case, say a precedent, you should use the procedural labels like “the defendant,” “the claimant,” etc., with no initial caps.
Use only the surname after once stating an individual party’s or witness’s name, and a shorthand (not a regular abbreviation unless it’s well-known) after stating an entity’s name. Durosola Kolawole becomes Kolawole after the first full mention.
First Bank of Nigeria Ltd becomes First Bank after the first full mention. Skip the “hereinafter called.” If a party’s name is James Ngerem and he’s the only Ngerem in the case, you can begin calling him Ngerem from the second time he’s named, without first saying James Ngerem (hereinafter called ‘Ngerem’) or James Ngerem (Ngerem).
This applies to all legal writing including transactional drafting and professional correspondence. (In professional correspondence, it’s silly, isn’t it, to start a letter by saying you have been consulted by or you act for or represent Ngozi Zokari (hereinafter called ‘our client’) or Ngozi Zokari (our client).
If you are acting for Ngozi Zokari, she is your client. Without the irritating parenthetical legalese, your reader knows whom you mean each subsequent time you say in the letter our client.
And forget “counsel for Appellant,” “counsel for Respondent,” “learned Claimant’s counsel,” “learned Senior Advocate for the Petitioner,” “learned silk,” etc. It’s not the lawyers’ case; it’s the parties’ case. It’s not the advocates’ story; it’s the litigants’ story.
Litigation is not about litigators, but about litigants. Parties, not their attorneys, assert arguments and move applications, “no matter if you are referring to your own side or the opposition.” Murray & DeSanctis, Advanced Legal Writing, 238.
Don’t write “Learned counsel for Appellant submitted that” …. Write “Appellant submitted that” … This is even better: “Innoson submitted that ….”
One of the demerits of citing advocates rather than parties is this: upon changes of counsel, a character in the story leaves the stage and another enters, which could confuse the narrative.
And as an advocate, it’s easier to be severely critical of the other side when you reference the party rather than their advocate, your beloved colleague.
Chinua Asuzu, Brief-Writing Master Plan (Partridge, 2022) 241–243
