I lost ~400 followers overnight.

Luckily, I know why, and it’s nothing “bad” I’ve done.

In fact, it’s a good thing. Why?

Because LinkedIn is cleaning house.

It is going through all accounts, figuring out which are dormant or fake, and removing them from the network.

Dear Rising 2L, This legal resume tip explains how to make all your date entries line up perfectly, flush with the right margin.

Instead, I know, you’ve been tabbing and spacing over, trying to get it “just right” so your dates look straight.

Well, they don’t.

When I was 24, I was single, broke, and childless.

—All I said to myself was, ‘I can’t wait to finish law school & start making money,’ and ‘I long to get married and have children.’

When I was 34, we had 3 girls under age 5.

—We paid for 1 full-time nanny & 2 full-time daycare programs, at an after-tax cost of ~80K annually.

Hypothetically, let’s assume it’s a non-diverse, male candidate, and that he’s coming straight from a small, rural college, with

- a 164 LSAT,
- a 3.8 GPA, and
- a need for full scholarship help.

Dear Legal Writer,

If you supervise a lot of junior legal writers, you likely face a passive-voice problem.

Please send them to this carousel for the fix. ⤵️

Dear 1L (Rising 2L?),

It seems cruel. Your “reward” for finishing the hardest year of law school is staying around to do an onerous Bluebook test and—yet another—big legal-writing project.

I would be SO tempted to skip the whole thing.

Mother’s Day

I’m starting a list of tips for students and new graduates who’ll be starting their first “lawyer” jobs at law firms soon.

I hope you can help me add to and improve the list.

There have been times in my life that were very, very serious.

20 yrs. BigLaw. So, so serious.

When a daughter would say,

Mommy, come play—

I would say no,

The great Melanie Kalmanson is hosting a free webinar with special Bluebook tips just for you, and it’s happening TOMORROW.

Sign up so you can get the recording to watch after exams, if you can’t attend.

I’m thinking of you all and sending good cheer through this May slog—

When my LinkedIn notifications stopped being reliable, I looked for another way to make sure I kept up with my friends’ and fellow creators’ posts.

First I tried looking up all the names that I could think of off the top of my head, and I checked their profiles. Sure enough, they had posts I’d never seen.

I once had a debate with a BigLaw partner over the expression, “The game is not worth the candle.” He wanted to include it in our federal, 4th Circuit brief.

I had never heard the saying before, and, after looking it up, I was even more sure it was too obscure for a brief. We didn’t want to sound pedantic (~snooty in a scholarly way), I pleaded with this partner.

“Is comprised by” is always wrong.

Here’s why. ⤵️

“To comprise” = “to contain,” “to consist of,” “to be composed of.”

✅ All these sentences are correct:

-The whole contains its parts.

Sometimes, when a final (or a bar exam) was just days away, I would still be trying to master a lot of concepts and memorize rules. I just didn’t have it in me to take practice tests.

So I didn’t try.

I just read a lot of model essay answers.

Dear 1L,

Don’t forget to answer these questions to earn extra points in your exam essays:

1. Is there a fact that, if different, would change your conclusion?

2. Would your conclusion differ if the case were judged at another time in history?

Dear Legal Writer:

My friend, Min Cho, suggested that I write about “i.e.” and “e.g.”  To begin, please know that unless you’re a Latin scholar, getting these correct is not intuitive.

Both abbreviations get used a lot in legal writing, so you’ll want to make sure you learn and can use them.

Here’s a short guide.  ⤵️