Do lawyers love the shift key? Have a heart for big letters?

Anyone who reads court documents enough might get the impression that attorneys think that grammatical rules, which only call on capital letters for the beginning of sentences and proper nouns, just do not apply to legal prose.

Curious to learn why, we put the question to Twitter, called some legal writing experts and got a volley of responses with insightful reasoning, historical perspectives, strong disapproval and some good puns. It turns out that a good number of counsel hate over-capitalization and may even have personal vendettas to end the practice.

Ross Guberman, president of Legal Writing Pro, wrote in an email that he often sees words like plaintiff, agreement, motion, defendant, federal or state capitalized.

"In public, many lawyers and judges say it's silly to define obvious terms, but in private, they do so anyway," Guberman said. "The habit starts in law school."

Some legal writers postulate that caps-loving is a holdover from history.

"Blame The Framers," tweeted University of Pennsylvania School of Law professor Dave Hoffman.

Mike Medford, partner in Manning, Fulton & Skinner in North Carolina, tweeted a more detailed explanation: "It was common practice as far back as the Constitution, and change comes slow to the formalities of legal expression. It's the same reason that many court filings begin with the archaic formulation 'Now comes the Defendant.'"

Some attorneys do come to uppercase's defense, noting they have some logical purposes in legal writing. Yet even defenders admit caps are overused.

Julie Schrager, counsel and writing coach in Schiff Hardin in Chicago, said she can see the logic of using caps for words such as "plaintiff" and "defendant," which refer to a proper noun. She also embraces referring to "the court" with a capital, as a sign of respect. But she's noticed lawyers using capital letters to emphasize the importance of words, which she thinks should stop.

"I think it's probably pretentious: 'I know what's important, so that's why I'm capitalizing,' " explained Schrager.

Paul Kat, an appellate solo practitioner from San Francisco, tweeted this more bluntly: "It's symptomatic of the unifying principle of bad legal writing—pretending that it's something more abstruse than merely one person trying to persuade another person of something."

Lawyers agree uppercase is useful for defining terms in legal prose, but does it go too far?

Rich Phillips, partner in Thompson & Knight in Dallas, thinks something's wrong.

"A pathological need to define terms in the hope that no one will be confused. See also the phenomenon of unnecessary parenthetical definitions, e.g. XYZ Inc. (hereinafter "XYZ")," he tweeted.

Even David Fine, a small-letter crusader—with a lowercase 'c,' he said—has admitted he's got a vendetta against capitalization abuse. But he is willing to compromise on the use of upfront definitions. That way, he said, a lawyer won't have to keep explaining a definition through a filing.

The problem is that from there, caps can become contagious.

"Lawyers see those 'defined terms' and don't understand it's defined terms. They see weird capitalization. They get to thinking, 'That's just how we do it," explained Fine, a partner in K&L Gates in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. "What happens is a few people do it, and other people look at it, and think that's what you are supposed to do. So-and-so filed a 'Motion' with a capital 'M,' seeking to dismiss the 'Complaint,' with a capital 'C.' There's no reason for it."

Other counsel are joining a call for change.

"Some of us are trying to Change this, but the Law changes slowly by Design," tweeted Matthew Preusch, an attorney with Keller Rohrback in Santa Barbara.

Portland solo practitioner Michael Fuller noted on Twitter, "I refer a few dozen colleagues a year to Typography for Lawyers but the old guard seems resistant to change."

Those who have quit capitalization abuse will never look back, such as Athul Acharya, an attorney at BraunHagey & Borden in San Francisco.

"It's stupid. I am very grateful that when I clerked, we had an intern in chambers who had previously been a journalist for many years. She corrected some of my overcapitalization, explained why, and materially improved my legal writing forever," he tweeted.