

B.A. Amherst College 1967
J.D. University of Michigan 1972
[email protected]
SSRN Author Page
"I think no reform would more fundamentally improve our profession and the work we do than learning to express ourselves in plain language."
Professor Kimble was a staff attorney for the Michigan Supreme Court and the Michigan Court of Appeals. He later practiced law in Flint, Michigan, and was an adjunct professor at Cooley. He joined the full-time faculty in 1984.
He is senior editor of The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing and the longtime editor of the "Plain Language" column in the Michigan Bar Journal. He also writes an editing column called “Redlines” for Judicature.
He has published dozens of articles on legal writing and written three popular books — Lifting the Fog of Legalese: Essays on Plain Language; Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please: The Case for Plain Language in Business, Government, and Law; and Seeing Through Legalese: More Essays on Plain Language. He has lectured on writing to legal organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. He served as a drafting consultant to the Sixth Circuit Committee on Pattern Jury Instructions and the Michigan Committee on Standard Criminal Jury Instructions. He now serves as the drafting consultant to the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States. He led the redrafting of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence.
Professor Kimble is also a past president of the international organization Clarity, served as the executive director of Scribes (the American Society of Legal Writers), is a founding director of the Center for Plain Language, and was on the board of the Legal Writing Institute. He is a Fellow of the State Bar of Michigan and the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the State Bar's Publications Committee.
He has won a number of national and international awards:
Professor Kimble taught Research & Writing and Advanced Research & Writing. He developed the original course for Introduction to Law I. He is now senior director of Cooley's Kimble Center for Legal Drafting.
Some of his articles are collected at SSRN.com/author=624332.