Legal Definitions - prolixity

Prolixity refers to the practice of including excessive, unnecessary, or redundant information in legal documents or during court proceedings. It means presenting facts, arguments, or evidence in a way that is overly long, repetitive, or irrelevant to the core issues, making it difficult to understand the essential points. Courts often disfavor prolixity because it wastes time, obscures important legal arguments, and can increase litigation costs.

• Example 1: Overly Detailed Legal Complaint

  A plaintiff files a lawsuit for breach of contract. Instead of concisely stating the terms of the contract, how it was breached, and the resulting damages, the complaint includes a 75-page historical narrative of the plaintiff company's founding, detailed biographies of all employees involved in the contract negotiation, and philosophical essays on the nature of business ethics. None of this extensive background information is directly necessary to establish the legal elements of a breach of contract claim.

  This illustrates prolixity because the plaintiff has included a vast amount of information that is not essential to the legal claim, making the document unnecessarily long and difficult for the court and the opposing party to navigate the actual legal arguments.

• Example 2: Rambling Witness Testimony

  During a trial, a witness is asked to describe a specific event they observed. Instead of providing a direct and concise account, the witness delivers a rambling narrative that includes irrelevant details about their morning routine, unrelated personal anecdotes, and lengthy digressions about their feelings on the weather, before eventually, and often vaguely, touching upon the pertinent facts of the event.

  This demonstrates prolixity because the witness's testimony is filled with superfluous details and irrelevant stories, obscuring the pertinent facts and wasting the court's valuable time.

• Example 3: Excessive Legal Motion

  A lawyer files a motion asking the court to compel the opposing party to produce certain documents. Instead of presenting a focused argument explaining why the documents are relevant and why the opposing party has failed to produce them, the motion includes a 200-page appendix containing every email exchange between the parties over the past five years, numerous social media posts unrelated to the discovery dispute, and repetitive legal arguments that have already been made in previous filings. The core argument for the motion is buried within this excessive material.

  This is an example of prolixity because the motion contains an excessive amount of irrelevant and redundant material, making it unnecessarily cumbersome and difficult for the judge to identify and evaluate the actual legal grounds for compelling discovery.