Welcome to my LinkedIn archive.
Categories: Dear 1L, Dear 2L, Legal Writing
By Year: 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021
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Search by word to find what I’ve written on the topic of your choosing!
Dear 1L, There is a secret to the memo: You must pretend your professor knows NOTHING.
—She doesn’t know any of the facts.
—He doesn’t know any of the research.
—They don’t know any of the legal rules.
NOTHING.
Your professor is just some random lawyer from the street who happens to pick up your memo to read.
Could that random lawyer follow your memo?
The answer needs to be “yes.”
Dear Legal Writer, The No. 1 way to cut words without losing substance is to put your verbs into active voice, but most lawyers stop after doing only half the job:
▶️ They fix their main verbs but forget the verbs in their dependent clauses.
Take this sentence, for example:
“The motion was granted by the court because the evidence submitted by the plaintiff was inadmissible.”
Most would spot the passive in “was granted by the court” and change it to “the court granted,” but what about “the evidence submitted by the plaintiff”?
Dear 1L, The comma goes INSIDE the quotes, OK?
Here’s how to remember: “𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐤𝐢𝐝𝐬 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲 𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐈𝐃𝐄 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞.”
🩳 Commas and periods are little kids.
They sit on or BELOW the line.
“Little kids” are short.
They’re too short for cars to see.
They must play INSIDE of the fence.
They must do that for their safety.
👖 But semi-colons and question marks?
Exclamation points, too?
They’re all big kids.
Dear 1L, Beware of this mistake I made when I wrote my very first memo. It has been 33 years, but it STILL bothers me when I think about.
I based my whole analysis on what the courts SAID about my issue instead of focusing on which side had WON in each of the cases.
Be careful!
👉 A case can contain language that seems helpful to your position when the case itself actually HURTS your position.
Dear Legal Writer, When I write, I draw a hard line between “this” and “that.”
You think these words mean the same thing, but they can have dramatically different effects.
Consider: “Plaintiff argues that because she is Black and her supervisor is white, his decision to fire her must have been race discrimination.”
Now you want to explain why that argument’s wrong, but you have to choose “A” or “B”:
A. “This argument fails because . . .”
B. “That argument fails because . . .”
What to do if you fail a midterm:
Dear 1L, I got a 35 on my Contracts midterm.
(35 out of 100.)
It was Oct 1993.
It was my first & only feedback.
I thought the world was going to end.
And it forced some intense soul-searching.
To be sure, like most 1L midterms, mine was merely a “practice” exam. But to me, it was devastating.
Dear 1L, Everyone I talk to is dying right now.
Between midterms, the memo, AND recruiting for summer internships, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
And the memo is killing you.
It’s eating up way more time than expected, and you feel lost on how to structure the Discussion section.
You’ve got cases going both ways, arguments that seem to fit in multiple places, and no clear sense of what should come first.
Dear Legal Writer, Hi! Here’s the before & after from my big day presenting in Chicago.
BEFORE: I was NERVOUS before presenting this morning.
AFTER: It went really well.
Here’s what we ended up talking about:
— Three mistakes new associates make on page 1
— Three things to include in every case description
Dear Legal Writer, Let’s hunt some zombies!
They are verbs hiding inside clunky noun clauses:
For example, take the clause, “make the decision”:
ORIG: The court made the decision to exclude the expert’s testimony. 👎
REV: The court decided to exclude the expert’s testimony. ✅
“Made the decision” is not wrong.
Get your sample 1L Memo
🔷 FRAMEWORK
Assume your hypothetical asks whether a plaintiff can prevail on an issue that has three subparts, A, B, and C and that you conclude the plaintiff is likely to satisfy A, B, and C—and therefore likely to win on the overall issue. For each subpart section (sections A, B, and C), you should proceed in this order:
A: Plaintiff should satisfy element A.
Will you celebrate with me today? 🎉🥳
Because five years ago, 9-22-2021, I hit “post” here for the first time.
I hoped to find law students who might need my tutoring help.
(I also secretly hoped someone would notice me and offer me a “real” job.)
What I found instead was a professional home, a workplace, and eventually all of you.
And THAT feels worth celebrating.
Dear 1L, There’s a right way and a wrong way to DM a lawyer on LinkedIn.
🛑 The WRONG WAY is to:
-Pick a random lawyer
-Learn nothing about them
-Send them a generic message
-Explain you want to “pick their brain”
-Make clear you seek a 1-time transaction
-Suggest that they “jump on” a 60-min Zoom
Dear Legal Writer, I once wrote for a partner who hated the word “that.”
He crossed it out automatically—every time he saw it—to save space.
But sometimes, deleting “that” makes the reader picture a judge physically holding a party.
That was not a clarity improvement.
I recently reviewed a 2L résumé that broke my heart. 🥲
3.7+ GPA.
Three years of experience.
Impressive volunteer work and leadership.
Yet she had received not one interview through OCI.
Her career-services office could not understand why. Neither could I—until I saw the actual résumé.
Dear Legal Writer ("DLW"): This is a post ("Post") about a pesky habit ("Habit") I see in most litigators (“Litigators”).
The Habit: sticking a word in quotation marks, then stuffing it in parentheses (hereinafter, a "Parenthetical").
Once you start suffering from this Habit, you can't stop, which is a condition I call can’t-stop-itis ("Can't-Stop-Itis").
——Exhibit A ("Exhibit A")——