How to Organize and Write a Legal Memorandum

• ISBN: 9781543821154

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• Description

  Legal memoranda are business documents, in which the writer communicates information to help the reader make a decision about one or more aspects of a legal matter they are addressing. This book explains how to organize and write legal memoranda that communicate information to the reader clearly and effectively. It is written primarily for first-year law students, but upper-class law students and practicing attorneys can also use it, to produce more effective legal memoranda or written legal analyses generally.

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  Professors and students will benefit from:

  • The book’s emphasis on the basic rule for organizing business documents effectively—to state the most important information first—which applies to the legal memorandum as a whole, to its parts and subparts, and even to most of its paragraphs and individual sentences.
  • The book’s reader-focused orientation, which anticipates information that a reader will find helpful in a memorandum and explains how, and where, the writer should include it.
  • The individual chapters on the different parts of a legal memorandum, which provide concise but specific instruction about the purpose, format, organization, and effective presentation of each one.
  • The separate chapter on informal and e-mail memoranda, which adapts the skills and strategies for organizing and writing formal legal memoranda to the shorter and less formal memoranda that attorneys frequently write.
  • The chapter on How to Write Clearly, which contains specific guidelines for writing clear sentences and paragraphs, presenting related information clearly, and using correct grammar, precise word choice, and a clear, professional style.
  • The extensive, annotated examples throughout the book, which illustrate how to organize and write the different parts of a memorandum—and how not to organize and write them.
  • The book’s use of templates—succinct, annotated outlines of the structure and content of the different parts of the Discussion component of a memorandum—which are intended to assist the book’s readers in moving from instruction to work product.