And while you’re at it, cut “regard” from your vocabulary altogether:

👎 “Regarding”
👎👎 “In regard to”
👎👎👎 “As regards”

All of these sound like nails on a chalkboard in legal writing.
They bloat your sentences and make them sound clunky and awkward

She only received two, according to reports, and they came as a shock:

a B in Crim;
a B- in Torts.

True, Justice Kagan was at Harvard Law School—where simply passing might be cause to celebrate—but her story should inspire you wherever you attend.

“Find” and “hold” mean very different things.

▪️ “Find” refers to determining facts—what actually happened. This is the job of a fact-finder (a jury, or sometimes a judge in a bench trial or preliminary hearing).

▪️ “Hold” refers to a legal conclusion—a court’s determination of what the law means or what the law requires, given the facts.

‍ ‍

Well, here’s why we use it and how you can do so effectively in your spring brief:

🔷 “To be sure” signals, “I will now acknowledge the point that most hurts me, in hopes of defusing it on my own terms.”

Please, if you didn’t get what you’d hoped for, please know there’s nothing wrong with you, and you are not some sort of screwup.

—> What happened is you got screwed by a brutal curve.

I’ve heard the expression articulated in a number of different ways over the years, and they all piss me off.

So here’s what I want you to remember instead:

I hadn’t worked a “real job” in 5 years;
I’d let my lawyering skills lapse;
I’d let my people skills lapse;
I’d let my self-worth lapse;
I’d become a nobody.

But the worst part was having no community.

—To me, it meant awkward alumni dinners, bar ass’n meetings, and cocktail mixers with lawyers 20–40 years older than me.

—I spent events like those wearing a plastic smile, laughing at jokes I didn’t understand, and feeling like a complete idiot.

-law school applicants,
-law school students,
-full-fledged lawyers of all levels.

I’ve identified the top 10 most common errors.

So I made a checklist for you.

I hope it helps!

It’s called “Fagan of Hoboken & the Horseshoe,” and it tells the wild—and true—story of our great‑grandfather, Lawrence Fagan (1851-1921).

🔹 Born in Dublin, Fagan came as a child to a Lower Manhattan tenement where he attended NYC public schools, and by the late 1800s, he’d settled in Hoboken, NJ, where he worked as a blacksmith’s apprentice on the Hudson waterfront, gradually working his way to become a successful iron manufacturer and an active Democrat.

They:
—read the question;
—try to figure out the answer;
—then write an essay to justify that answer.

That’s the worst thing you can do.

Instead, you should:
—read the question,
—write one side’s best arguments;

1️⃣ MISTAKE 1:
You post with a FIREWALL. 👺

You post an article you’ve written,
but you give us no info about it.
And the full article’s behind a firewall. ❌

So we can’t read it, so we don’t like it or comment on it, and we definitely don’t save it. We just scroll on.

I thought I’d share this here, too.

1️⃣ Dear 1L (this one’s by me & is written directly to a 1L, so if you only get one book, it should be this one)—Read before law school and then use as a supplement throughout the year.

You should set up your essays that way.

To illustrate:

Imagine Negligence as a big corporation, “Negligence, Inc.,” that has a clear corporate hierarchy.

At the top sits the President, “Negligence” herself.

I’ve been saying those things for 4 years.

I’ve put up maximum resistance to anyone and everyone who’s tried to get me to venture outside the LinkedIn pool.

The truth is, I’ve been too scared.

And I’m still scared.

But: