The Legal Memo: 50 Exercises for Mastery: Practice for the New Legal Writer

To write an effective memo, legal writers must first master a series of distinct and crucial skills: fact selection, narrowing of the specific legal issue, correct rule formulation, and accurate application of law to the client's facts, to name but a few. This book provides the practice new legal writers need. The book contains fifty exercises, most of which can be done lightning-round style, taking just fifteen minutes.

For more in-depth practice, the book also contains exercises taking about thirty minutes; these take a deeper dive into the material and bring together several different skills. Each exercise is independent, so students and professors will have little ramp-up time and can get right into the skills practice. Half the exercises have annotated sample answers in the back of the book, so writers can check their work. All exercises have been tested on law students.

Using this book, legal writers can practice what they have learned from professors and primary casebooks. Any legal writer using these exercises will develop a keen understanding of the memo's various components and necessary skills.

Cassandra L. Hill is the Dean and a Professor of Law at the Northern Illinois University College of Law.

D'Andra Millsap Shu is an Associate Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law Houston.

Katherine T. Vukadin is a Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law Houston, where she teaches legal research and writing.