Law Commons^™

The Genre Discovery Approach: Preparing Law Students To Write Any Legal Document, Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Katie Rose Guest Pryal

Employers bemoan that new lawyers cannot write. Professors teaching upper-level law school courses wonder why students cannot apply their first-year (1L) legal writing skills. Law students worry that their legal writing courses have not prepared them to write all of the document types they will encounter in practice. In response to these complaints and fears, law school administrators push legal writing professors to squeeze more and more different document types into first- year legal writing courses.

I argue that the “more documents” strategy does not adequately prepare practice-ready legal writers. We cannot inoculate our students against every conceivable genre that …

The Rhetoric Of Email In Law Practice, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article responds to and appears alongside an article by Professor Kirsten Davis in the December 2013 issue of the Oregon Law Review. An interesting debate has arisen among legal writing faculty with respect to the primary form of communication today between attorneys, and between attorneys and clients. Although most legal writing faculty agree that teaching traditional memoranda continues to have pedagogical benefits for first-year students, there is disagreement on how to conceptualize and teach the use of email memoranda in law practice. Professor Davis argues that to think of and label “email memoranda” as something different from traditional memoranda …