Important book. The "Roget's" of the legal profession.
Customer Rating: 
This book, now in its fourth edition, is an essential companion to Black's Law Dictionary, Garner's Legal Usage book, and other essential legal reference books. Great for law students, lawyers, judges, paralegals/legal assistants, and just about anyone else dealing with legal language. This book gives alternatives to stilted, overused, and misused, language. Worth the price (especially if one compare it on a site like Nextag, Shopzilla, and others).
Indispensable Tool for Your Legal Writing Kit
Customer Rating: "Good luck," my employer wished as he handed me a plane ticket and a tome of a background packet. I was leaving on a critical six-week business trip to an alien state in the midwest. No problem - except that five days prior the law review had accepted me as one of three evening division 2Ls for candidacy and my first case abstracts were due in twenty days. Hmmm . . .
From my hotel room, I scanned, identified, analyzed, condensed, reviewed, and rewrote the abstracts. Then did it again. And again. And again. But I was missing something. I was missing that "oomph" that propels a reader when reading legal material. And I didn't know what to do.
I decided to take a "creative" break down at the local (bookstore). Of course, I immediately gravitated to the law section of the store and, before you could say "double espresso, please," I had found it! Burton's Legal Thesaurus.
I opened the pages and my heart fluttered. Over 5,000 entries, legal synonyms for any legal term that came to mind, definitions, an overview of federal "plain language" requirements, associated legal concepts, and the list goes on! I wiped away a tear.
I rushed back to my hotel room and my fingers began flying over the laptop. My abstracts sang with power and precision! I could feel the reader compelled - nay, helpless - to turn the page! Burton's Legal Thesaurus had saved the day! I was now a jurisprudence scholar!
Eh, not really. But it really helped out when I didn't have access to my usual materials. However, one thing of which I can assure you, I'll be using this thesaurus for the rest of my career. If you've ever tried to write a legal document with a conventional thesaurus, you've probably felt the same way I did - close, but not close enough. But where do I find "close enough"? Read some more cases? Subscribe to a half dozen law journals? Hang out with the professors? This book definitely dispenses with that problem. You'll find everything you need to write a work filled with persuasion and vigor contained within its pages. If you're not that creative with legal lingo (as I, obviously, am not), you need to order it now. Frankly, you're putting yourself at a serious disadvantage if you don't.
