Legal Writing: Strategies and Techniques for Law Students

Legal writing is a very important skill that every law student needs to master if they want to succeed in college and also in their professional lives. Whether you’re writing a memo, a thorough brief, assembling arguments, or simply presenting your ideas/opinions on a case, ensuring clarity and quality is essential. 

When working on a legal document, it is important to focus not only on quality and precision but also on ensuring that your content is well-structured and logically presented so that it fits legal standards.

If you don’t know much about legal writing you must read this post as here in this guide, we are going to discuss in detail the different strategies and techniques that would help you refine your legal write-ups. First, let’s start with the basics…

What is the Purpose of Legal Writing?

Before we start discussing the different tips and tricks for improved legal writing, we would suggest you read about the core purposes of writing legal documents. 

To Inform

One of the main purposes of legal writing is to inform a client or a bench about a complex legal issue. This can be in the form of a memo or even a detailed research paper.

To Advocate

Legal writing can also be for advocacy purposes. Legal briefs, motions, and other similar write-ups can advocate for a particular side or outcome. This type of writing heavily relies on analysis and arguments. 

To Record

Some documents, like contracts or court orders, can also serve as formal records for a law firm or for clients involved with the case/deed.

Before writing a document you must know the purpose as it would help you focus on the appropriate factors. 

So before you draft, ask yourself whether you are explaining the law, making an argument, or simply reporting facts or findings.

Important Strategies and Techniques for Legal Writing

Now that we have shed light on some of the basics, let’s go through the tips you need to follow to improve your legal writing skills.

Focus on Through Research & Analysis

You would only be able to write effective content if you focused on the research stage. Without research, there is no way you would be able to ensure quality in your work. So before you write you need to ensure that you are familiar with the relevant facts and laws that need to be discussed. 

For research purposes, you must take into account both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources refer to the law itself. This can include case laws, judgments, presidents, regulations, and the Constitution. All of these are the backbone sources for any legal argument. Secondary sources on the other hand refer to practice guides, treatises, and review articles. These sources can help you understand the context of certain laws.

Write a Clear & Concise Thesis Statement

Whether you are writing a memo or a brief, you need to understand that a clear thesis statement is a very important part of the document. The thesis must summarize and present your main argument or the legal issue in a single sentence.

The content you write must be relevant to the thesis and should support it or elaborate on the matter. If you don’t have any experience with writing legal thesis statements, we would suggest you get help from AI generative solutions such as ChatGPT-4 and many others. 

These tools can provide you with sample thesis statements based on the prompts you provide. 

Follow Legal Writing Conventions/Structure

As a law student, you must familiarize yourself with the legal writing conventions. Legal writing is effective when it is organized and follows a proper structure. 

You have to understand that readers of your write-ups are not ordinary people; rather they would be fellow attorneys, students, judges, and people related to the legal fraternity. So it is important to follow a predictable structure that can enhance clarity.

Here we have mentioned the common legal writing structures you can consider following:

• IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion): This is one of the most common writing structures that is used when analyzing and crafting documents on legal issues. When following this style or structure you need to start by stating the issue, then outline the relevant legal rules, apply rules to the facts of the case (application), and end with the conclusion. 
• CRAC (Conclusion, Rule, Application, Conclusion): This structure is similar to IRAV but you must know that here you would start with the conclusion instead of stating the issue first. This structure is usually followed when you are writing a persuasive document in which you want to make your position clear on a certain matter or judgment.
• The Triage Approach: This structure or style is usually followed when writing legal memos. Here you start by stating the most important issues and discussing them logically. This style is quite useful for law students specializing in litigation or complex case analysis.

You need to follow the style or structure that is relevant to the purpose or nature of your writing.

Organize Your Documents & Ensure Simplicity

When writing legal content, you need to make sure that your drafts are well-organized. No one is interested in reading large chunks of text which is why you need to divide your writing into multiple headings and subheadings. 

By using headlines, you can easily divide your work into digestible sections for readers. You must start each passage with a clear topic/statement followed by a detailed analysis, arguments, and evidence. 

A very common mistake that most law students make is that they make their drafts overly complicated and academic. Well, you must know that using overly technical and convoluted language is only going to compromise quality. For this reason, you must avoid overcomplication and use clear and simple language.

Make Your Writing Concise, Remove Redundancy

As a law student, it is important to ensure clarity in your work. This means you need to make sure that your content is easy to read/digestible for readers. You must not use jargon or technical terms which might confuse relevant parties. 

You must also make sure that you remove wordiness and redundant details from your draft. The more concise your document would be the stronger impact it would have. 

To ensure simplicity and clarity, we would suggest you take help from a free paraphrasing tool. 

An AI paraphrasing tool relies on NLP and other advanced technologies so it can easily understand the core message/arguments/ideas in your writing and can represent them in a clear and human-like manner. By using a paraphrase tool, you can not only ensure clarity but also ensure 100% originality.

Don’t Forget to Revise and Edit Your Work

Legal writing is not like other types of writing and you must ensure perfection as it is going to define your credibility as a lawyer. You must always proofread and revise your drafts even if you are confident about the first draft. 

You should reread the document and ensure that it is clear. You need to remove any unnecessary words and phrases as you revise. Most importantly you need to check that your draft is free of all kinds of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Tools like Grammarly and Grammar Guru can help you with this area. 

Misleading citations or factual inaccuracies can undermine the credibility of your work so always ensure that they’re accurate.

Conclusion 

As a law student or a paralegal who wants to be a successful lawyer, you must focus on legal writing. Becoming a skilled legal writer requires a lot of practice so we would suggest you always spend some time writing outlines, reviews, memos, etc. 

In this guide, we have discussed some of the important tips you need to consider when writing your legal documents. By focusing on research, choosing the right structure, ensuring clarity, and spending time on revision, you can easily write a compelling document. 

Also note that after writing your draft don’t hesitate to seek feedback from professors, writing experts, or practicing lawyers. Their feedback would help you improve your writing skills!