Dear 1L – Advice on OCI Writing Samples
đź’Ś Dear 1L,
I’ve recently been making my way through a big stack of your legal writing samples for OCI.
A lot of you are using 7-9 page excerpts from longer briefs you wrote in your spring-semester, legal-writing class.
Doing that is fine—I know you likely need to shorten the brief and focus on legal analysis—but before you do, consider this perspective:
🔹 Your Reader is no longer your professor.
🔹 Your Reader knows nothing about the parties or facts of your case.
Being that Reader, I see which briefs read well, and which do not, which “work,” and which do not.
Here’s one big takeaway:
đźš« It does not work to just omit the Introduction, Facts, and Legal Standard, without doing more. Your Reader will be lost.
I realize that you have limited time, but in a perfect world, you would reduce to the 7-9 page limit WITH all of these beginning sections included, but the whole brief tightened.
Barring that, in the very least, please do the following:
🔸 Introduce and redefine the parties (their full names and which is plaintiff/defendant in the case); and
🔸 Introduce and redefine the motion your brief supports or opposes, and any other terms that the introductory sections had defined.
You might accomplish the above in a long cover memo.
Better yet, you’ll incorporate them into the very start of your excerpt.
***
I could go on, and I’ll have more observations coming up, but the above jumped out at me, so I wanted to drop a note in case it applies to you.
Sending you luck and good cheer in the upcoming stress-fest.
Fondly,
đź’Ś Amanda
July 13, 2022
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