SQE Journey

Stop Making Your Reader Wait For The Point

The Minto Pyramid Principle: stop making your reader wait for the point. That's the whole idea behind a framework Barbara Minto built at McKinsey more than fifty years ago, and it's one of the most useful things you can steal for your legal writing before you've even qualified.

The Habit Some Legal Writing Falls Into

People generally write in the order they think. They start with the background, walk through what they checked, explain the law they found, and only at the end do they tell you what it actually means. That order feels natural because it mirrors how you worked the problem out. It's also exactly backwards for a reader who wants to know one thing first: what should I do.

Partners, and clients are all the same kind of reader. They're busy, they're scanning, and they're trying to extract your conclusion as fast as possible. If it's buried on page two, you've made them do work you should have done for them.

Who Barbara Minto Is And Why McKinsey Still Teaches Her Work

Barbara Minto joined McKinsey in 1963 as the firm's first female MBA hire and spent a decade there, first in Cleveland then in London. Her job wasn't analysis. It was editing the reports that crossed her desk, and she noticed the same problem again and again: consultants had done good thinking but presented it in the order they'd done it, mixing findings and conclusions with no clear line to the recommendation.

Her answer became a course, then a manual, then in 1985 a book: The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking. McKinsey still teaches it to new hires today, and it spread to Bain, BCG and most other consulting and professional services firms.

How The Pyramid Works

The structure is simple to state and harder to apply under pressure.

You open with your answer. Not your topic, not your process, your conclusion. Then you support that conclusion with the handful of reasons that justify it, each one a genuine reason rather than a restatement of the same point. Then, underneath each reason, you put the evidence and detail that backs it up.

Minto's test for whether your supporting reasons are any good is that they should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, usually shortened to MECE. In plain terms that means each reason covers different ground, and together they cover the whole picture, with nothing missing and nothing repeated.

Applying The Principle To A Legal Email

Below is one way of writing an email. For background context this is a response to a query about whether a client can terminate a supply contract.

"I've been looking into the termination question under clause 12. I started by checking the material breach definition, then went through the correspondence between the parties, then reviewed the notice provisions in clause 15, and also checked whether time was of the essence for delivery. Having gone through all of that, my view is that the client probably can terminate, although there's some risk around whether the notice period has been properly complied with."

That's not bad legal work. It's bad ordering of good legal work. The reader has to hold four unresolved threads in their head before they get the one sentence they actually needed.

Now The Pyramid Version

Below is the same version as above using the principle.

"The client can terminate the supply contract, but only if we serve notice within the next 14 days. This depends on two things. First, the supplier's failure to deliver qualifies as a material breach under clause 12, which the correspondence supports. Second, clause 15 requires notice to be served within a strict window, and we are close to missing it."

Same research, same conclusion, same risk flagged. The difference is that the reader gets the answer in the first sentence and can decide immediately whether they need to read on, ask a question, or act.

Why This Matters Before You're Qualified

This isn't just a style preference. In FLK 2 style tasks, in a client care letter, in an attendance note, in a case summary you hand to a supervisor, you're being assessed on whether you can extract the point and lead with it. That's a judgement call, not a knowledge one, and it's exactly the kind of gap between knowing the law and knowing how to use it that shows up early in a career and either gets noticed or gets you noticed for the wrong reasons.

The good news is that it's a habit, not a talent. Before you send anything this week, try one thing: write your first sentence last. Draft normally, then once you know your own conclusion, go back and put it at the top. You'll be amazed how often the rest of the email barely needs to change.