In Texas state court, the word limit for appellate briefs is 15,000 words. In federal court, it’s 13,000—down from 14,000 in the recent past. Even with that many words, we sometimes need to edit briefs down. After all, a four-week trial is hard to summarize onto paper. But in many state courts around the country, the limits are much tighter. In Colorado, for example, appellate briefs top out at 9,500 words. That includes a cross-appeal, and the courts don’t always grant requests for additional words. And in some state supreme courts, you get only a short supplemental brief at the highest level of review rather than a full-scale brief on the merits.
Your first instinct is to feel constrained. Shorter limits seem oppressive—like the court is asking you to do more with less, to leave important arguments on the cutting room floor. But experienced appellate lawyers often find the opposite is true. When you have to cut, if you do it right, what you’re almost always sacrificing isn’t substance but muddled thinking. The extra words were hedging, restating, or circling an idea you hadn’t quite pinned down yet. Tighter word limits don’t force you to say less. They force you to think more clearly. And the brief is almost always better for it.
The discipline of compression reveals whether you actually understand your own argument—or whether you were relying on volume to paper over the gaps. Of course, as 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal reportedly said, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” Writing shorter is harder. It takes more drafts, more tough choices, more willingness to kill your darlings. But that’s exactly the point. The extra effort is what produces clarity.
There is another reason to care about brevity that lawyers sometimes overlook: the people reading our work. Appellate judges carry staggering caseloads. In many federal circuits, each active judge participates in hundreds of cases per year, and state appellate courts are often no different. Every unnecessary sentence in a brief is a sentence a judge must read, process, and set aside before reaching the point that actually matters. Judges will rarely tell you this directly, but every word you cut from their reading load is a small kindness—and likely a strategic advantage.
A brief that respects the court’s time signals confidence. It tells the judges that the lawyer has done the hard work of distilling the case to its essence and that what remains on the page is there because it matters. A sprawling brief, by contrast, can signal the opposite: that the lawyer wasn’t sure which arguments were strongest, so the lawyer included all of them and left the sorting to the court. Judges notice.
Here is where modern technology enters the picture. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools—including large language models of the kind I’ve written about in this column before—are increasingly capable of helping lawyers identify bloat in their own writing. You can feed a draft brief into a (secure) AI platform and ask it to flag redundancies, highlight passages that restate a point already made, or suggest tighter phrasing for a paragraph that meanders.
The technology is not perfect, and it certainly cannot replace the lawyer’s own judgment about what to cut and what to keep. But as a first pass at identifying where your writing could be leaner, these tools show genuine promise. They are, in a sense, an always-available editor—one that never tires of reading the same section for the fifth time and that has no ego invested in keeping a clever turn of phrase that doesn’t earn its place.
None of this means that every case can be briefed in 9,500 words. Complex multi-party litigation, cases with extensive regulatory backgrounds, and appeals from lengthy trials sometimes genuinely need room to breathe. But those cases are the exception, not the rule. For the vast majority of appeals, the instinct that we need more space is often a sign that we haven’t done enough thinking—not that the court hasn’t given us enough room.
The legal profession has always valued persuasion, and persuasion has always been intertwined with economy. The most memorable oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court are often the ones where the advocate said less, not more. If tighter word limits push us toward that ideal—and if new tools can help us get there—we should welcome the constraint rather than fight it. The discipline of fewer words may be one of the best things that can happen to legal writing.