Folks in Litigation: did you hate your legal writing course? Forum

[Anonymous User]

3rd year litigation associate here. I hated my legal writing class during 1L, but here I am in GCL and enjoying my time. Any other litigation folks with the same experience? I had a 1L reach out to me as part of a mentorship program at my T14 who likes the idea of litigation but hates his legal writing course.

Also, for those who hated legal writing in law school and disliked biglaw litigation, please share your thoughts too!

[basketofbread]

I’m also in lit.

I did hate it but for a particular reason
- I was a serious 1L gunner and I hated that legal writing actually required us to hand in assignments. I was laser focused on consuming supplements at my own pace to prepare for the doctrinal exams. Legal writing was more difficult to game, there isn’t really a strategy to getting top grades (my LRW was graded on a curve). So I just viewed it as a distraction.

Even if you’re not a gunner I can understand disliking it because it’s such a different flow from the rest of law school. Also LRW tends to have adjuncts so perhaps professor quality varies.

In hindsight I think it was a pretty useful class. LRW plus some clinical experience during law school should situate you well for big law lit.

[Anonymous User]

Biglaw litigation partner. I thought it was quite useful and enjoyed it more than most of my 1L classes. I definitely do not follow IRAC/CREAC slavishly, but there are framing strategies and technical writing tricks I learned in LRW that I still use today and try to pass on to others.

[AllAboutTheBasis]

Not the same practice area but I do a lot of writing (tax). I loathed my legal writing class, I found it overly stressful, arbitrary, and too restrictive. I love writing generally and I love legal writing in my job.

I definitely learned important skills in legal writing but job writing is much more enjoyable.

[namefromplace]

I didn't hate my legal writing course, but it didn't leave me with a favorable impression of legal writing. That changed after I took a more advanced writing course from an adjunct who genuinely loved legal writing and I learned things weren't quite as rigid as 1L LRW made things out to be.

[crazywafflez]

I thought it was fine? I enjoyed it as much as Torts, less than Con law, and more than Civ Pro?

I did find it semi useful for my work though (especially just doing memos and short email answers). I don't use IRAC a ton, but it certainly helps narrow one's thoughts and makes some lengthy stuff coherent.

[Anonymous User]

echoing namefromplace. Biglaw junior with circuit clerkship coming up. I did not particularly like LRW. I didn't "get it" at the time. It felt rigid, uninspired, and in hindsight it only teaches the bare minimum for legal writing. I went to a T6 and got below median grades in LRW. Later, I took an upper level writing course that was far more useful and that's where it all clicked for me. Part of that might be that I was better at law by that time (I entered law school not really understanding the game and didn't grasp it until 2L). A book from someone like Garner should really be the backbone of the "writing" part of LRW, not whatever the adjunct or junior professors come up with.

[Anonymous User]

I didn't so much hate it as I could sense even back then that the person teaching the course didn't really know anything, which is a larger problem with legal academics trying to teach practical skills courses (and I went to a T14, not a cow patch school). Legal writing where I went was viewed as a "stepping stone" course for aspiring law professors--it's where they'd place junior / adjunct professors who were auditioning for a more permanent slot. I had a guy who'd practiced all of two years in private practice before fleeing back to legal academia and it showed, even to law student eyes.

[Anonymous User]

I didn't so much hate it as I could sense even back then that the person teaching the course didn't really know anything, which is a larger problem with legal academics trying to teach practical skills courses (and I went to a T14, not a cow patch school). Legal writing where I went was viewed as a "stepping stone" course for aspiring law professors--it's where they'd place junior / adjunct professors who were auditioning for a more permanent slot. I had a guy who'd practiced all of two years in private practice before fleeing back to legal academia and it showed, even to law student eyes.

Chicago? More of a slaughterhouse school than a cow patch school, I guess.

[Prudent_Jurist]

I hated it my first semester. Similar to others above, I loved writing. I came from a bachelor’s/master’s in philosophy: loved argumentative writing to the core.

But 1L fall felt so stale, so rote— I felt dominated by a syllogism. It didn’t help that I turned in the wrong draft of my final assignment with improper citations, so I was bitter about my grade.

1L spring was better. It was still rote, but the professor was an incredible teacher (since retired and has a named lecture series). I flourished in her course.

Once I began substantive legal work, though, I regained my passion, especially externing 3L for a state appellate court judge. I really liked his writing: brief, pointed, plain English. He let me play in the judicial sandbox. I held a childlike joy.

I’ve carried that with me to my firm now. In the desert of doc review, I search for motion writing like a man seeks an oasis. I unravel string cites as a child unwraps Christmas gifts. I crave the legal lacunas of civil procedure.

I dream of those legal quandaries my state’s Supreme Court has punted for decades. I thank them for lacking the balls to make the tough call so I can gird my loins, stare into the abyss, and make a novel legal argument. Don’t worry— I know no one cares about these things but myself. I’m not doing important work. But it’s work I love doing.

[axiomaticapiary]

This thread is so encouraging. My plan has always been to go into lit. My whole background is in writing (English major, worked in media and publishing for years before law school, original life plan was humanities academia). I am a 1L and I have just hated Legal Writing and it has literally made me doubt my future path. Like maybe I shouldn’t be aiming for the “journal/clerking/lit” track and should just do transactional because I figured this is an accurate portrait of what the profession is like. So it is affirming in a way that my original plan might be worth sticking with

[Anonymous User]

I didn't so much hate it as I could sense even back then that the person teaching the course didn't really know anything, which is a larger problem with legal academics trying to teach practical skills courses (and I went to a T14, not a cow patch school). Legal writing where I went was viewed as a "stepping stone" course for aspiring law professors--it's where they'd place junior / adjunct professors who were auditioning for a more permanent slot. I had a guy who'd practiced all of two years in private practice before fleeing back to legal academia and it showed, even to law student eyes.

I disliked LRW for similar reasons. At the T14 I went to, it wasn't all that rare for the writing professors to have zero professional experience beyond a summer internship (and a fair number only had a clerkship or two besides their SA, with no time actually practicing). My professor was one of the folks with absolutely zero professional experience, not even a clerkship. It made the class pretty awful, as it was apparent even as a 1L that the professor had no idea what they were really talking about and that they shouldn't have been trying to teach brief writing when they'd never done it themselves. They pretty clearly also had an area of the law they were passionate about, and were only teaching writing as part of the requirements of the program they were in.

I went on to litigate in biglaw for 5+ years before leaving litigation. Writing briefs was by far my favorite part of litigation, and it consistently came up in reviews that writing was my strong suit. Still is one of the favorite parts of my job, although I spent far less time doing substantive legal writing for courts than I used to since I left firm life.

[Joachim2017]

At the T14 I went to, it wasn't all that rare for the writing professors to have zero professional experience beyond a summer internship (and a fair number only had a clerkship or two besides their SA, with no time actually practicing). My professor was one of the folks with absolutely zero professional experience, not even a clerkship. It made the class pretty awful, as it was apparent even as a 1L that the professor had no idea what they were really talking about and that they shouldn't have been trying to teach brief writing when they'd never done it themselves. They pretty clearly also had an area of the law they were passionate about, and were only teaching writing as part of the requirements of the program they were in.

This is such a good, important point. I don't understand how early-career tenure-track profs are assigned to teach a course that is specifically for practitioners. Like, you may have great pie-in-the-sky theories about the nature of tort law or the intersectional problems with criminal law and politics, but if you just got good grades, clerked, did a fellowship, and are now teaching -- with no writing experience as a practitioner -- you won't be as effective a teacher, and students will know. A majority of students want to *practice law*, not theorize about it. It just blows my mind.

[nixy]

I’m in lit and I liked my LRW class, but I don’t think that hating it means you’re not cut out for lit. I had a bunch of reasons for liking it that don’t apply to everyone, and I have friends who are in lit who didn’t like it.

One of the big reasons I liked it is simple - I did well and got an award for it. Conversely I had friends who graduated order of the coif who didn’t like it in part because they got median grades in it no matter what they did. That’s mostly just a function of the curve and not much you can do about it (of course this is assuming your class is graded. Ironically I think if it’s not graded it’s easier to just think it’s a waste of time so either way there are reasons not to like it).

My prof was really pretty decent - at my school they weren’t aspiring academics given the job to work their way into the field, they were local practitioners with reasonable experience, so that helped a lot, too. (After 1L I interned for a local SSC justice who had a terrible experience with interns from one specific T6 school, and some of it may have been attitude but a lot seemed to be because they had shitty LRW training given that their profs were recent law grads who wanted to break into academia.) A bad prof can make any class unpleasant and I agree with the comments above about how a lot of top schools hire people with no practice experience at all (or teaching experience, for that matter) to teach LRW. It’s not a recipe for success.

The class itself can still be tedious because it’s hard to make teaching about writing interesting, it’s really different from your other 1L classes, and enough people dislike it that the actual class experience can be kind of bad. And some classes will just be poorly designed or taught.

I think one of the biggest things about LRW though is that for a lot of students it’s the first time they’ve had to really think about writing within a really specific discipline and it’s a tough transition. Lots of my classmates had always been “good writers” in undergrad and most of the time that’s something you absorb a little bit by osmosis as someone who reads and writes a lot. Even if you’re in a writing-heavy major - and even if you work hard on your writing - you’ve probably ended up there in part because you liked the subject, you’re good at it, and it works for your brain. And while different majors do emphasize different things (a biology lab report is different from analysis of a poem), most undergrads are learning how to write good undergrad papers, not getting trained in hardcore professional wiring.

Legal writing, however, is professional writing, and it makes you learn a new style of writing all over again. And nobody “naturally” thinks/writes like that, and it’s also sort of close to what you’ve been doing, close enough to feel like your current approach to writing should be sufficient but it’s not really quite. So a lot of people find that transition frustrating.

Personally, I had a different career before law school which entailed a very different kind of professional writing than what I did in undergrad. I had been a history major, I wrote a lot, and did well, and when I went into that career I struggled a LOT with making my writing fit this particular professional mold. I eventually did, though, and it made it much easier for me to adjust to LRW than it was for my (especially K-JD) classmates.

I think it’s like learning a foreign language. The first time you do is the hardest because you’ve never done it before and it’s really hard to get your brain out of English mode. Lots of people learn English without really learning the grammatical rules so when you take Spanish you have to learn what all the different verb tenses are before you can actually learn Spanish verb tenses. And you’re just not used to thinking about what you normally do automatically. But once you’ve learned one foreign language, it’s much easier to learn other foreign languages, because you know the general process and you can see similarities/differences between them that help everything make sense. Legal writing is like a foreign language, and especially if writing has been relatively intuitive for you before you get to LRW, the adjustment can be hard. Of course there are some people who adjust very easily, just like there are some people who learn languages very easily, but lots of people struggle.

To bring it back to the OP, though, the fact that it’s like learning a foreign language is why I don’t think hating LRW means you’ll hate lit. Once you’ve learned a particular language, how easy or hard it was to get there is irrelevant, and it’s how you use it that matters. Plenty of people hate learning verb tenses in Spanish, but that doesn’t mean they hate speaking Spanish once they get it all down.

Now, hating LRW *could* mean you hate lit, if you really do just hate reading cases and writing about them and trying to persuade. But if you hate it because your prof is bad or the class just doesn’t work very well or because you find you’re struggling at something you always did well at before, I don’t think those are bad signs for lit. I think it’s very common for it not really to click until later in law school.

(Sorry to go on at such length, this is just something I’ve actually thought about quite a bit so had to share ALL my thoughts!)

[Anonymous User]

Agree with the above. I wrote professionally in my pre-law career and received recognition for my writing ability in that field, so Legal Writing was a bit frustrating because I had to unlearn a lot of the skills and techniques that had made me a successful writer. But looking back, it was a necessary transition and there was really no other class in law school that prepared me to write as a lawyer (I did not take any advanced writing classes). I then did two clerkships and those + legal writing + my previous experience writing generally have allowed me to become someone at the firm that people turn to for writing challenging briefs, even though I didn't look to specialize in that way. So it may be crappy when you're in it, but you are likely learning (and unlearning) a lot that will prove helpful.

[Anonymous User]

At the T14 I went to, it wasn't all that rare for the writing professors to have zero professional experience beyond a summer internship (and a fair number only had a clerkship or two besides their SA, with no time actually practicing). My professor was one of the folks with absolutely zero professional experience, not even a clerkship. It made the class pretty awful, as it was apparent even as a 1L that the professor had no idea what they were really talking about and that they shouldn't have been trying to teach brief writing when they'd never done it themselves. They pretty clearly also had an area of the law they were passionate about, and were only teaching writing as part of the requirements of the program they were in.

This is such a good, important point. I don't understand how early-career tenure-track profs are assigned to teach a course that is specifically for practitioners. Like, you may have great pie-in-the-sky theories about the nature of tort law or the intersectional problems with criminal law and politics, but if you just got good grades, clerked, did a fellowship, and are now teaching -- with no writing experience as a practitioner -- you won't be as effective a teacher, and students will know. A majority of students want to *practice law*, not theorize about it. It just blows my mind.

i'm going to be starting a VAP and I have no idea how I'm going to do this. i'm specifically going into academia because i much prefer theoretical stuff than actual practice. i knew this in law school so i never tried to get good at brief writing, though i am clerking. why is it i'm going to be teaching legal writing?

[Anonymous User]

At the T14 I went to, it wasn't all that rare for the writing professors to have zero professional experience beyond a summer internship (and a fair number only had a clerkship or two besides their SA, with no time actually practicing). My professor was one of the folks with absolutely zero professional experience, not even a clerkship. It made the class pretty awful, as it was apparent even as a 1L that the professor had no idea what they were really talking about and that they shouldn't have been trying to teach brief writing when they'd never done it themselves. They pretty clearly also had an area of the law they were passionate about, and were only teaching writing as part of the requirements of the program they were in.

This is such a good, important point. I don't understand how early-career tenure-track profs are assigned to teach a course that is specifically for practitioners. Like, you may have great pie-in-the-sky theories about the nature of tort law or the intersectional problems with criminal law and politics, but if you just got good grades, clerked, did a fellowship, and are now teaching -- with no writing experience as a practitioner -- you won't be as effective a teacher, and students will know. A majority of students want to *practice law*, not theorize about it. It just blows my mind.

i'm going to be starting a VAP and I have no idea how I'm going to do this. i'm specifically going into academia because i much prefer theoretical stuff than actual practice. i knew this in law school so i never tried to get good at brief writing, though i am clerking. why is it i'm going to be teaching legal writing?

Because none of the doctrinal faculty want to teach it (because it doesn’t confer prestige/fame) and they aren’t any better at teaching it than you are, so they can dump it on the least-paid, least-prepared people who are also unlikely to be around long enough for the school to have to address any complaints about them!

(To be clear: not defending this, just describing.)

Accidental anon, this is nixy