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Legal Writing

Legal Writing Prof Blog

By law professors Coleen M. Barger, Sue Liemer and Nancy Soonpaa

Post Frequency: 31.6/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 15:42:31

Supreme Court issues order requiring shorter reply briefs.

Posted on February 10, 2010
Effective next Tuesday, February 16, 2010, the United States Supreme Court is mandating that advocates trim 1500 words from their reply briefs. Until then, attorneys can still use 7500 words with which they can try to persuade the Court. According...

Scholarship alert: Volume 18, (Fall 2009) "Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing"

Posted on February 10, 2010
18 PERSPECTIVES: TEACHING LEGAL RESEARCH AND WRITING, NO. 1, FALL, 2009 Brutal Choices in Curricular Design... Mika, Karin. Games in the law school classroom: enhancing the learning experience. 18 Perspectives 1-6 (2009). Enquist, Anne. Multitasking and legal writing...

Professionalism alert: How not to write to a potential employer.

Posted on February 10, 2010
Many of you may remember this law student-employer email dust-up from a few years back that traveled the globe and back, serving as a warning about how private emails can go viral as well as a lesson in how not...

uneven career effects of poor skills curriculum

Posted on February 09, 2010
Irene Segal at NYU has articulated previoulsy unconsidered challenges for legal education in her article on "The Undertraining of Lawyers and its Effect on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in the Legal Profession". Here's her abstract: "The undertraining of...

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Do you have your WestlawNext free academic password yet?

Posted on February 09, 2010
Apparently not many do - including me - according to Joe Hodnicki at the Law Librarian Blog. Joe suggests that West may be reluctant to distribute free passwords to the academy until its paying customers make the upgrade. You can...

Dan K. Webb Advocacy Center at Loyola Chicago

Posted on February 08, 2010
Loyola University Chicago School of Law has just announced that it has named its nationally recognized Center for Advocacy after law alumnus Dan K. Webb (JD ?70). Webb, the chairman of the Chicago law firm Winston & Strawn, is widely...

job opening in Los Angeles

Posted on February 07, 2010
In the one part of the country where it's not snowing, the University of Southern California Gould School of Law is seeking an assistant or associate director of legal writing and advocacy for its international LLM program. This person will...

proofread people!

Posted on February 06, 2010
Apparently sign engravers and legal writers share a similar occupational hazard: public typos. (spl)

wanted: plain language nominees

Posted on February 05, 2010
The Center for Plain Language will be giving awards in April for documents that are especially well written. There are several categories in the "good" section (ClearMark awards to the best examples of plain language), and there's also a "bad"...

Friday Fun

Posted on February 05, 2010
A post from Ruthann Robson on the Constutional Law Prof Blog shows a google search from a student who doesn't understand con law. Have a quick look. (mew)

A sneak peak at the new Lexis-Microsoft legal research platform

Posted on February 04, 2010
Following up on our post yesterday about the forthcoming Lexis-Microsoft legal research partnership announced at the LegalTech conference in NYC, we've got a sneak peak courtesy of the Martindale-Hubbell Blog: Lawyers live in Outlook. I don?t know if that?s a...

Scholarship alert: "What Do Clients Want From Their Lawyers?"

Posted on February 04, 2010
This is a working paper from Georgia State Law Prof Clark D. Cunningham and is available here on SSRN. From the abstract: This working paper assembles empirical data from England, Australia and the United States indicating that individual clients do....

Here's an example of how not to prepare for oral argument

Posted on February 04, 2010
Although not a legal argument, this video clip does feature an oral argument by two attorneys seeking investment capital on a reality television show called "The Shark Tank." I admit I'd never heard of the show before seeing it mentioned...

Is it time to bag the whole "May it please the court" thing?

Posted on February 04, 2010
Thanks to Chris Wren for bringing to my attention this post from the Volokh Conspiracy in which the suggestion is made that we stop teaching students to prepare overly formal introductions for oral argument. Here's the post from GW Law...

Breaking News: SNESL is now UMass Dartmouth School of Law

Posted on February 02, 2010
Southern New England School of Law (a private institution) today became the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth (a public institution). The Southern New England School of Law had failed to receive accreditation from the American Bar Association. The Chronicle of...

Scholarship alert: "Reframing Legal Education's Wicked Problems"

Posted on February 02, 2010
Having lived in Boston for 15 or so years, I can relate to this wicked cool sounding article by Professor Judith W. Wegner, found at 61 Rutgers L. Rev. 867 (2009). From the abstract: The essay, by one of the...

Not be outdone, Lexis announces partnership with Microsoft to change the way you do legal research

Posted on February 02, 2010
Lexis just raised the ante in the commercial legal research wars by responding to yesterday's roll-out of WestlawNext (see below) with an announcement of its own: It's partnering with Microsoft in a venture that will change the way you do...

The big roll out for WestlawNext

Posted on February 02, 2010
The big news this week is that Westlaw rolled out its new legal research platform on Monday - called WestlawNext - that is supposed to provide users with a more "Google-like" search experience. I haven't yet had a chance to...

The perils of social networking when it comes to one's writing routine

Posted on February 01, 2010
Raise your hand (or click your mouse) if you get distracted by the internet when you sit down to do your professional, academic or work related writing. For some, myself included, writing and procrastination go hand-in-hand like Jack Webb and...

Stephen Colbert Analyzes a U.S. Supreme Court Decision

Posted on January 31, 2010
Our blog focuses on legal writing and its teaching. When we teach, we must teach ourt students about how to interpret and apply precedent. On a recent sow, Comedian Stephen Colbert analyzed Chief Justice Roberts' concurrence in Americans United, the....

where has all the narrative gone?

Posted on January 31, 2010
Ken Chestek, at U. Indiana -- Indianapolis, posted this thoughtful analysis on the listserve for legal writing professors and graciously agreed to let us share it here: "Citizens United, in my opinion, is a great example of the kind of...

Half a Million Page Views

Posted on January 30, 2010
This week our "Sitemeter" tells us that we've had more than 338,000 visitors and more than half a million page views. Thank you for supporting the Legal Writing Prof Blog. Nancy, Sue, Coleen, Mark, and Jim

in today's news ...

Posted on January 30, 2010
Bob Sachs, at Rutgers-Camden, brought our attention to the "On Language" column in last Sunday's N.Y. Times Magazine section. It shared a number of interesting headlines that show the English language run amuck: "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim" "Red Tape...

Professionalism alert: Should lawyers use emoticons in emails?

Posted on January 29, 2010
In an interview with the New York Times, Bryan Cave managing partner Don Lents advises young lawyers that emoticons should not be used in client correspondence. Emoticons, as we know, are often used to compensate for the shortcomings of email...

Two new web-tools that link legal citations to the sources they reference

Posted on January 29, 2010
Here are a couple of new tools, one called Citer developed by the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, the other called Jureeka, that both connect legal citations in webpages with a free, full text version of the cited source....

New York Times reports on big changes coming to commercial legal research engines

Posted on January 29, 2010
As we previously reported, Monday marks the debut of a purported radically new Westlaw search engine that is designed to appeal to users who expect Google-like simplicity in all the search engines. Lexis will roll-out a similarly new search engine...

Partner to associates: sometimes there's no substitute for face-mail

Posted on January 28, 2010
Writing emails is great but one partner reminds firm associates that there's sometimes no substitute for face-time with a client. In a New York Times interview, Bryan Cave chairman Don Lents advises young lawyers that ?if you think you are...

Wexis announce major changes to their commercial search engines

Posted on January 28, 2010
Facing competitive pressure from Google Scholar and other open source search engines, as well as consumer pressure for a more "Google-like" search experience, both Westlaw and Lexis have announced they will be rolling out radically new search engines in the...

visiting legal writing professors needed in Ohio

Posted on January 28, 2010
The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law will have openings for visiting professors to teach the first-year course in legal writing for the 2010-2011 academic year. Their first-year legal writing course is taught in the spring semester, but depending...

what's in your horoscope?

Posted on January 27, 2010
The daily student newspaper where I teach prints the daily horoscope. Usually I read these for entertainment. But once in awhile they contain pearls of wisdom. Yesterday mine read: "Enhance your power by adopting enusiasm for the written word. Plan...

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