Junk Legal Verbiage Banned In AZ

The Arizona Rules of Civil Procedure now include a blanket prohibition on some popular legal terms in any answers filed in state court. Included in the prohibition is the phrase “the document speaks for itself” (which was characterized as an “amorphous nothing” by one impatient judge). The revised rules also single out the term “states a legal conclusion,” when used to respond to a request regarding a fact or application of law to fact. The phrase “an amount to be proven at trial,” while not entirely prohibited, must be accompanied by additional detail that approximates what’s at stake by placing the claim into one of three defined tiers- the lowest below $50,000, the highest more than $300,000. If the pleading doesn’t specify a tier, the court will assign one.