Speaker 1: So you're in law school and you just got back your first law school memo. You must be a 1L and you probably were surprised about the grade and not pleasantly surprised. It's okay because you're going to have other legal writing assignments. Writing a client letter, writing a motion for summary judgment, writing an opposition motion for summary judgment, and when you get further along a moot court brief. So legal writing is not going anywhere. I'm going to give you some tips on how to improve your legal writing so that you can plug in a formula and apply it to any legal assignment that you're going to get in law school. Let's talk about it. Okay, so before I get into the details, the tips and the formula about how to improve your legal writing, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Click that notification bell so that you're the first to see content when we post every Sunday. And also don't forget to hit that thumbs up button so that you can see more content from us as well. Okay, so let's start with the 1Ls. The 1Ls who've just gotten back their first law school memo. You may have to do a rewrite of it. They may make the assignment a little bit more complicated. More than likely it started out as a closed universe assignment, meaning they gave you all the information you were going to need. You didn't have to go research anything and you had to use the information that they provided to write a memo. And the memo was usually directed to someone else in the law firm to advise them about the information in the case. And so just as a reminder, you have to always consider who your audience is when you're doing legal writing. In the law school memo case, it was perhaps another associate or a partner at the law firm. Later on when you write client letters, your audience is going to be your client. And so you would have to write it in terms that lay person can understand. When you get a little higher and you're writing for the court, you're going to write a motion for summary judgment or opposition. Your audience is the court and you have to write in a certain way to convince the court. And so you always have to be mindful of your audience in regards to how you're presenting the information. And the information, the facts are going to be the same, but how you present them is what is going to make the difference between presenting it to a judge versus presenting it to your client who has no legal background or understanding. So keep that in mind when you're actually writing any of these assignments. Keep in mind who your audience is. Okay, so let's start out with the one else. You were given the law school memo assignment and it probably started out as a closed memo where they gave you all the facts and all the law. This is pretty easy because you have, this is the only information you have to work with. And you basically have to take that information and to distill it into a memo that basically guides the person, the associate or the partner about what the issue is and whether or not you feel that your client will win the particular case. And so I would say, take advantage of the closed memo assignments because it doesn't require you to do any research. You don't have to decide whether, oh, is there any case law that I forgot about? They gave you all the information. And what you're doing is putting it into CREC format or IRAC. And you're stating the conclusion and you're stating the, CREC stands for Conclusion, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. And you're basically telling the associate or the law partner what the conclusion is, whether you think your client is going to win, what the rule of law is, you're citing the particular case law and the facts associated with the case. And then you're doing your analysis. Hey, based on this information, the facts that we have, we are going to either lose or win because of this. And then you're concluding again. And so it's pretty straightforward. And I know it's different from how you're used to writing if you came straight from undergrad or even a master's program. It's a totally different way of writing. But in this closed memo assignment, they're just trying to get you to understand how to do rule application, rule synthesis, and to apply the facts to the rule. So this is what the assignment is. You have to understand what the point of the professor assigning things. They want to understand, can you take information and put it into a brief and succinct memo to inform your particular higher up, your supervisor, whether you're likely or unlikely to win a particular case. So after you do your closed memo assignment, they're going to probably open it up to a research. So they're going to expect you to go out and find the particular law that was going to help your position. And a word of advice, don't just go looking for a law that only supports your position. As a lawyer, you have to be able to put on both hats. You have to be able to see the other side. What is the opposing counsel going to say? So when you're doing your research, if you find case law that you seem like, oh, this is going to sink my case, that's fine. You have to actually acknowledge that it exists. And perhaps you can distinguish your case from that case that you see that seemingly is a bad case for you. But you have to acknowledge it. Don't pretend that it doesn't exist. The assignment is to see how much information you can find and how you can use that information to your advantage. So when they open up as a research assignment, make sure you find as much case law for both sides. And then you can take that information and distill it into how you want to use it later. It's a persuasive assignment. And you can say these cases, you have 16 cases that support your position. Oh, wait, I acknowledge that there are two cases that perhaps seemingly don't support my position. But let me tell you why I still win. And that's basically how you lawyer, you don't run away from negative facts, negative case law, you hit it straight on. So keep that in mind when they give you another assignment and they said it's a research assignment. Do a thorough analysis, make sure you shepherdize the case. Don't cite any cases that have been overruled. Make sure you're checking if you're using LexisNexis or Westlaw. Make sure you're using cases that are actually still good law. This is part of lawyering too. You can have what you think is a slam dunk case in real life and you get to court and the judges say, didn't X versus V overrule this? And you're sitting there like, I don't even know about that case. So keep it in mind that you have good case law when you're actually doing the research assignment. Okay, so I'm going to briefly talk about four parts that you're going to see in mostly every legal assignment you're going to probably get in law school. And that's going to be the facts, the rule synthesis, the rule analysis, and case analogy. And so let's talk about a little about each one of those. So as a lawyer, you're going to have a certain set of facts. And as a lawyer, you're going to have to actually massage those facts to help your client. So let's say the issue is a civil case and somebody is suing for battery or false imprisonment. That's usually what they start out with. And so you have the facts that say person A was 12 feet away from person B. And depending on who you represent, you want to make the 12 feet either smaller, seem very small, or you want to make it seem very large. And that's how you basically use your facts to your advantage. So let's say if you want to make it seem like, oh, it was only 12 feet, then you might say, oh, he was less than from a house to a street, street distance away. So it makes it seem like it wasn't that bad, right? Or you can say, he was far away. So basically from the kitchen to the living room area, he could barely touch him. That's how you use it. It's still using the same facts, 12 feet, but using it in a way that either helps your client or makes your opposing counsel seem like, okay, this is not a big deal. 12 feet is not a big deal. Or if you're on the other side, say 12 feet is a lot, like it's a lot. So depending on what the facts are, you basically have to use those facts to your advantage. And it may require you doing a little bit of math. Like let's say you want to make it seem like it's a quarter of a football field. That's how far it was away. I mean, or you can say it was very short distance. I mean, basically you can feel the person breathing on your neck, basically. You have to decide whether the facts are going to help your client. And so you have to get creative about how you present the facts. And you're not lying. You're basically massaging the facts to help your client. And that's being persuasive in your writing. Okay. So next, let's talk about rule synthesis and rule application. So when you're deciding what the rule of law is, you're going to come across several cases. You're going to like, what is the rule of law for battery or intentional infection of emotional distress or false imprisonment? You're going to look up some particular cases. And based on these particular cases, you're going to synthesize what the rule is for. You're going to decide what the elements are that need to be met to win a case for whatever the cause of action is. And synthesizing, so they may come from different case law, and you put them all together. And that's what synthesizing means. And the assignment may be saying, okay, we want you to tell us what, based on certain cases, what the rule of law is for these cause of action. And so your job is also to apply the rule. So based on what you decide the rule of law is for whatever the cause of action is, you have to apply it to the particular case and say, hell, based on these facts, either we win all the elements, or we win three of them, and we may win the fourth one, it depends. But you have to analyze it. So apply what the facts are to whatever the rule of law you decided once you have synthesized. Okay, so let's talk about the case analogy part, the fourth one I was mentioning before. So case analogy, that's where basically you're going to cite a case and say what the facts of that case said and the holding was. So let's say the case is Smith versus Williams. And Smith versus Williams held that if somebody comes within five feet of a person and screams at them, then that's considered battery. Let's say that's the case holding, right? So you're going to take that case and say, okay, based on this particular information, either my client is similar to the particular parties in that case, or it's different. And you want it, depending on which side you're on, you have to distinguish them. So similar to the defendant in the Smith versus Williams case, my client, blah, blah, blah. Or this case is different from Smith versus Williams because my client was only six and a half feet away. And that's why you should rule differently, judge, if you're making a case to the judge, or if you're doing the memo and saying, this is different from the case in Smith versus Williams because our client was only six and a half feet away. And based on that case, you had to be at least 10 feet away. Or if you're on the other side, you want to perhaps say that the 10 feet away was not the reason why the case was decided. You can say, because the person yelled obscenities or came at a person in a menacing manner. Like depending on what the elements and the rule of law is, you're going to have to basically say that this case is similar or it can be distinguished from it. And you have to do a good job at making them seem like the same thing. This is the same thing. This is an open shut case, decide the same way that you did it. Or you're going to say, nah, it's different. And this is why you should decide a different way. You shouldn't use that as a reason why we lose the case. So keep in mind when you're doing analogy, you have to make a good job to hit the facts straight ahead and say, this is different. This is similar because enlisted. And you want to have quality over quantity. But if you have several cases that have this support your position, you're listing them all. And you're doing in parentheses, you're citing the case and the information that supports you. And it kind of looks like a whole paragraph full of like this all judge, this all supports my position. This is why you should rule in my favor. So your next assignment may be writing a client letter. And as I mentioned before, you have to always know who your audience is. So the previous information about knowing what the facts are, what the rule of law, what the rule of law is and analysis, that's all going to be included in the client letter, but you're basically going to present it differently because your audience is not a legal minded person. And so you're going to write your client and tell them you're going to repeat whatever the issue is. Hey, what I went on a case about if I needed to X, Y, Z. And so you're going to respond and say, this is yes, you perhaps would win. No, it's unlikely, or it's a 50 50 chance. And then you're going to go on to explain why this is the case. And without getting into the, I guess, too much of a legal jargon, explaining them like the what the rule of the law is, is you have to meet these particular elements. We may or may not have that information. Based on this, you are unlikely to win, or we have all this, you're likely to win. Would you like to pursue this case further? And that's the client letter assignment is basically understanding like, can you explain this to somebody who has no clue about the law? Usually what happens is, I think Albert Einstein quote is, if you can understand it and explain it to like a three year old or five year old, somebody else, then you really understand what your what the information is. If you can't explain it to somebody else, then you don't have a good grasp of it. And the client letter is a good gauge of whether you really understand what's going on, because you have to take the information, reduce it to information that somebody who has no basis of law or knowledge of the law to understand and have them appreciate what the these are the these are the case out there that will help us win. This is why you perhaps wouldn't win. This is like you can sue anybody, but they want to know, am I going to win? So the client letter is a assignment that tests whether you're able to explain some legal, very legal specific information to a non legal minded person. So that's what perhaps your next assignment would be. Keep that in mind who your audience is when you're writing that client assignment. The same information applies IRAC, CREC information, but in a way that your client can understand. So as you advance in your legal career, you're probably going to have to write a motion for summary judgment and also an opposition to a motion for summary judgment. Remember, I told you, you always have to wear both hats. And so your first assignment will be one or the other. And then they'll require you to switch hats and write the other the other version. And so if you're smart, you will, as you're writing one version, you will be keeping that in mind so that when you get the second assignment, you like, oh, yeah, I can write the other way, because I already saw the other way. So keep that in mind when you're, you know, you're going to get an assignment and required to write both sides of it. When you're writing a motion for summary judgment, basically, you're saying judge, this case should be granted because of there's no dispute effects. And the law would give me relief. Or you're saying judge, the case should be dismissed because there are no dispute effects and the person gets no relief under the law, depending on what the position is. And so the crux of a motion for summary judgment is saying that, OK, if you're asking for summary judgment, you want the judge to say, this doesn't need to go to trial. There is no need to waste the court's time. I win and it should be dismissed or I should get relief because even assuming all these facts, this is all the elements are going to be met or assuming all these facts, the elements are not going to be met. And so keep that in mind. The purpose of a motion for summary judgment is to avoid trial, is to save time in lawyers fees for your client or the other client and basically to take the information and say there's nothing to talk about because of this. And so the opposition side is to say, no, the facts have not been agreed upon. We need the judge to decide to be the fact finder and to say these are the facts. Or they might say, OK, yeah, we agree on the facts, but the person, the opposing counsel is misstating the law. And so since they're misstating the law, we need to go to trial so that you, the judge, can decide whether this is truly the law, the controlling law, and that we win or we lose. And so this is a tactic that you use a pretrial motion to avoid trial. It can be, like I said, because you think like, oh, it's a slammed up case, we win our relief or because you just want to get the case dismissed, depending on what side you're on. But keep in mind the purpose of the assignment is different from other pretrial motions because it's limited to are we agreeing on the facts or not? Are we agreeing on the facts of the law or we not? So keep that in mind when you're actually writing the motion for summary judgment as well. And then you're going to apply, like we said before, the law and state the law. And that's why I said also make sure you also have good law when you're citing it so that the other party doesn't say, that's not the law, judge. And this is why we need to go to trial so that you can state what the actual law is. A last point is when you're doing these legal assignments, they're going to check to see if you actually have correct citations, the correct formatting. A lot of courts have a certain format that you have to present it in, or they may reject your particular motion or filing. And so this law school assignment also tests whether you're able to follow the jurisdictions assignments, jurisdictional rules. So figure out what the rule is, make sure you have certain certificates of service, if that's the requirement of the jurisdiction, make sure you are correctly blue booking the particular cases. If they require page numbers, but not on the first page, spacing, all those little particular things that you think are annoying, do your whole assignment as far as the actual substantive information, and then go back and kind of do your citations and make sure you hit all the jurisdictional rules. But don't leave that out. Those are freebie points. Essentially, when you have the rubric and saying like, this is how you get your hundred percent, you don't want to get points taken off for not having the particular citations or the jurisdictional rules that they require. And they're testing you because if you have a client, and perhaps you didn't do the correct jurisdictional rules, and the court rejects it, and you filed the day before the requirement for filing, you can lose your client's case based on now you've missed the deadline. And they don't want you to have that situation. They want to make sure you know that there are rules that you need to be following, and that you meet them, and that your case does not get rejected when you're doing a particular filing in a court.