Inside the two-pager: A practitioner’s synopsis

In the Supreme Court, your synopsis is often your only real chance to be heard. If there is one hard lesson that 12 years in the profession has driven home, it is the line above and the uncomfortable corollary that most of us know but seldom acknowledge in our drafting.

A judge in the Supreme Court, given the extreme caseload, will almost always read the impugned order. If you are lucky, the court will then look at your synopsis. Only if your synopsis has done its job will the bench wade through the full petition. A veteran Supreme Court practitioner, in several podcasts and talks, has said this quite bluntly in his inimitable style. The synopsis, he says, is your prime real estate. If the court reads anything beyond the impugned order, it is most likely going to be your two-page synopsis. That is where you either win attention or lose the matter before you have opened your mouth. For me, that is my “two-page window.”

The best Supreme Court practitioners steal a march on three fronts: how they state their case and what they want from the Court; how they formulate the legal and factual points; and their ruthless economy of words. If your drafting is not built around these three pillars, no amount of case law will rescue the petition.

One of the earliest lessons I absorbed was to treat the petition page as the most valuable real estate I would ever own. In the Supreme Court, that real estate is tightly regulated: Times New Roman 14-point, 1.5-line spacing, with prescribed margins. Every word must earn its place.

On that constrained page, a good synopsis must, at a minimum, do the following:

• state the case in a coherent, chronological manner;

• identify the infirmities in the impugned order;

• articulate the relief sought with precision; and

• set out the grounds of challenge in a clean, workable structure.

All of this must be done without concealment, without overstatement and while still maintaining the conventionally respectful idiom of “it is submitted” and “it is most respectfully submitted.” You are expected to be concise, complete, deferential and impactful at the same time. If you have not thought hard enough, this is simply impossible.

One Senior Counsel’s bullet-pointed submissions, or pointillism as he calls it, whether in court or in writing, are legendary. There is a reason they work. Bullet points force you to:

• break down a grievance into digestible propositions;

• avoid long sentences and rhetoric that look impressive but say little; and

• mirror the way a judge reads, issue by issue, ground by ground, under significant time pressure.

A tightly-drafted synopsis that opens with, say, 5 numbered points, each a self-contained proposition, guides the judge’s eye, signals clarity of thought and compresses a large amount of information into the smallest possible footprint. Contrast this with the usual narrative synopsis: pages of facts, adjectives and unnecessary procedural history, after which the core grievance is still not obvious. Those are the petitions that invite a two-line dismissal.

My senior often spoke of the need to be a “thinking counsel.” I initially dismissed that as cliché. It is anything but. To draft a good synopsis, you must think before you type and, specifically, about these questions:

• What impression will the judge form on a first reading of the impugned order?

• If the judge only reads the order and my synopsis, what is the one line I want ringing in their head?

• What is the simplest, least wordy way of unsettling the impugned order’s logic?

• What is the Court’s recent institutional thinking on this area - bail, service, land acquisition,and how does that alter the pitch of my case?

Most SLP practice is about orders of the High Courts or tribunals. In reality, the judge’s starting point is, “A court below has already applied its mind and held so. Why should we interfere?” Your synopsis must, therefore, be drafted to answer precisely that - why interference is justified in this case. Drafting is not about showing how much you know; it is about altering the first impression created by the impugned order, in the least number of words possible.

One enormous advantage for us in this generation is the visibility of the judicial process. Live-streaming, virtual hearings and open-court access have made it far easier to see how judges read a brief in real time. If you pay attention, certain patterns become obvious:

• Judges repeatedly ask, “What is the error in the impugned order?” and not “What is the story of your client’s life?”

• They look for a clear articulation of jurisdictional error, perversity, procedural illegality, or a substantial question of law and not wounded sentiment.

• They are visibly frustrated by petitions that cite pages of precedent while failing to annex the critical documents.

Justice AS Oka, in a public lecture, had been particularly blunt about elementary drafting failures: law school essays masquerading as pleadings, failure to file essential annexures and an unwillingness to edit. Former and sitting judges have repeatedly told us how they read: first the impugned order, then the synopsis and only then, if necessary, selected parts of the paper book. If your synopsis does not align with that reality, you are not drafting for your actual audience.

Judgments themselves now speak more directly to drafting. Justice R Mahadevan’s decision in Zeba Khan v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Justice Dipankar Datta’s in Munnesh v. State of Uttar Pradesh have effectively laid down disclosure requirements for criminal SLPs: antecedents, status of investigation and relevant conduct during the proceedings. These are not optional details; they are drafting instructions expressed through precedent. A thinking counsel reads them that way and retools the synopsis accordingly.

In my experience, the best drafters are usually the ones who have read the most, and not just textbook law. Reading does 3 things for your synopsis:

• It exposes you to a variety of structures such as how different lawyers frame issues, break up facts, separate law and grounds, or craft a prayer.

• It shows you what not to do which is be wordy, repetitive, or misleading drafting that courts publicly criticise.

• It builds a mental library of ammunition which gives the right precedent or strategy under the right fact-situation.

In a bail matter today, if you are unaware of the Zeba Khan or Munnesh line of cases, you are drafting in the dark. In an Article 32 petition, if you do not have in mind the Court’s current reluctance to let Article 32 become a substitute for Articles 226 or 136, you will either over-plead and invite a maintainability battle, or under-plead and appear evasive. Pre-empting the court’s likely queries without manufacturing issues by your own drafting is only possible if you are reading the court consistently and seriously.

In an age of instant legal reporting, not knowing of an important legal development is less an accident and more a lapse. If you choose Supreme Court practice, keeping up, or at least trying to, must be part of the job description.

Finally, let me turn to something many of us are already doing, often quietly: using AI in drafting. The first problem is that AI is too agreeable. Unless pushed hard, it will not challenge your assumptions, test the relief, or ask whether the point is weak and should be dropped. It produces polished, inoffensive language that smooths out difficult edges. The result is what I call vanilla drafting: grammatically correct, tonally polite and strategically bland.

Second, AI gives a finished‑looking product far too quickly. This is dangerous. A neat, well‑formatted draft on your screen creates a false sense of completion. One may be tempted to file such drafts with minimal reworking. The problem is that the thinking has been outsourced, not just the typing. You have relinquished control over the architecture of your own case.

Used properly, AI can help with a first-cut structure, a chronology, alternative phrasing, or proofreading. What it cannot do is decide what to argue, which facts must be candidly disclosed, or how a particular bench is likely to react to the way a point is framed. If AI is drafting your synopsis, you are no longer the thinking counsel; you are merely approving someone else’s thought process. The Supreme Court’s recent draft guidelines on responsible AI usage are an attempt to regulate this problem precisely.

The synopsis is the expression of your case theory. If you do not own every sentence of it, you should not be signing the petition. Spend real time with the impugned order, the record and at least a rough draft of the petition before you touch any tool. Even when you do use AI, use it surgically, not wholesale. And ask yourself this: does the petition sound like your courtroom voice? If not, you have over-delegated. The goal is to increase efficiency and nothing else.

At the end of the day, drafting is a mode of advocacy. Good drafting creates an impression that often carries over directly into the hearing. If the judge has read a well-drafted synopsis, you have already been heard.

The art of drafting a Supreme Court synopsis ultimately lies in doing brutal thinking before you start writing and brutal editing after you are done. Everything else - whether it is fonts, formats, or even AI - is secondary.

I should also be clear about what this piece is and what it is not. I am not writing as an authority on “good drafting” but only trying to put into words what I have learnt so far and try, often imperfectly, to implement in my own work. A part of me, still very much a student of law, is genuinely excited each time I come across a well-drafted petition and I consciously try to emulate the best practices I see in the work of others. With time and experience, my understanding of both law and advocacy will inevitably evolve and so too will whatever I think I know today about the craft of drafting in the Supreme Court.

Shaurya Sahay is an Advocate-on-Record and Standing Counsel, State of Uttar Pradesh.