Kimble Center for Legal Drafting Established at Cooley Law School

Cooley Law School is pleased to announce that it has established the Kimble Center for Legal Drafting. The Center is named for Joseph Kimble, a distinguished professor emeritus and internationally recognized expert on plain language and legal drafting. He taught legal research and writing at Cooley Law School for more than 30 years.

The Center’s mission will be to produce and make available, to attorneys and consumers, legal documents that are clear and easily understandable. Students will be involved, and the Center plans to work with the school’s clinics and with bar associations on identifying and drafting the kinds of high-use documents that will most benefit the profession and the public. The Center is putting together a Board of Advisers consisting of the foremost experts worldwide in plain language, information design, and user testing.

“Our goal is simple but ambitious,” Kimble said. “We’re aiming to develop the best, most user-friendly consumer documents anywhere. They will not look like anything that the public is used to seeing from lawyers. We’ll start with just a few, but we’ll keep adding to them over time, and improving them as need be.”

The Kimble Center for Legal Drafting is now offering its first public seminar for practicing lawyers—with all funds going to the Center and its operations — on Friday, Oct. 11, 2019. Three legal-drafting experts will present the four-hour program, which will be highly useful to all attorneys who draft legal documents (rules, wills and trusts, business and real-estate documents, bylaws, and all the rest).