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!
It’s getting real, folks.
I’m spending the weekend in a final push on the book:
going through the last round of comments from the final proofreader.
A surreal feeling suddenly came over me on this early June morning, and I thought I’d share.
I bombed 1L legal writing. Got the lowest grade of my life.
It made me hate legal writing.
It made me never want to write.
Why am I telling you this?
Well, law school grades just came back.
Maybe you bombed writing, too?
It’s hard to know a law firm’s culture before you start working there.
Yet no one wants to start working at a firm only to find out it’s a culture mismatch.
You really need to do some detective work first.
Here are 6 markers of firm culture to look for & some ideas for how you might go about uncovering them:
The biggest complaint I hear from law-firm partners is that their associates don’t write well, and the partners are constantly having to rewrite their drafts.
The biggest complaint I hear from associates about legal writing is that the partners are constantly rewriting everything they write.
The result is that associates lack confidence in their legal writing.
“Myriad” vs. “a myriad of” vs. “plethora”
Dear Legal Writer,
Here’s everything you need to know:
🔸 To begin, “myriad” means “a countless number of specified things,” (Oxford English Dictionary), or “too many to count.”
On my first day at a big law firm, I was told I made a “big mistake.”
I had just returned to my desk after an early orientation meeting and was on the way to the loo, when my phone rang.
“Could you stop by as soon as possible?”
It was a partner. I’ll call him MB.
I was genuinely excited.
It’s hard to feel comfortable working at a law firm when the attorneys say things you’ve never heard before.
Here are 7 sayings that I heard for the first time at a firm.
Learn these today, so you won’t hear them, feel clueless, and be left to wonder.
⬇️
🔸 “I forgot how ‘green’ they are.”
Dear Rising 1L, I’m so excited to tell you about a new book meant just for you!
It’s called “Dear 1L: Notes to Nurture a New Legal Writer,” and it’s due out June 25, 2024.
🔹 If you read it, you’ll learn:
-What to expect every month of 1L
-How to research & write the 1L fall memo
Dear Legal Writer, No one wants to decipher writing like this:
“A triumvirate of murine rodents totally devoid of ophthalmic acuity were observed in a state of rapid locomotion in pursuit of an agriculturalist’s marital adjunct.
Said adjunct then performed triple caudectomy utilizing an acutely honed bladed instrument generally used for the subdivision of edible tissue.
PET PEEVE ALERT: “Plethora”
Dear Legal Writer,
I’ve been seeing “plethora” used inappropriately in WAY too many LinkedIn posts from legal peeps recently:
▫️ “We discussed a plethora of topics on the podcast.”
▫️ “Our new expert witness has a plethora of good ideas.”
▫️ “Jane has a plethora of adorable pets at her house.”
Harsh truth: Your law school will NOT catch the typos in your resume.
I’ve seen several hundreds of these resumes. Law students send them to me AFTER everyone’s already signed off, and AFTER they think the resume is “blessed,” “final,” and “good-to-go.”
BIG problem:
—I see nits & formatting errors.
—I see things SO easy to improve.
—It always breaks my heart.
Dear 3L (OG), I’ve been trying to write this letter for over a month now. But every time I start thinking about your graduation, I get mushy, and this letter gets schmaltzy.
We started this whole journey together, you know. You and me. This is year THREE! You guys are my original gang. I know your names. Your faces. Your fears, your triumphs.
I was a paralegal at a 175-lawyer Boston firm for 2 years before law school. Here’s a little about what I recall, along with some thoughts that may help anyone new who is starting out at a law firm.
🔹 I was hired fresh out of college and had no experience. There were 6 of us, plus a paralegal manager, and she was the only one with prior experience.
Dear Legal Writer, So much of what I’ve learned through LinkedIn can be traced back to ideas that I first heard from Jay Harrington.
—Luckily, when I was brand new here in Sept 2021, Jay’s posts were some of the first in my feed.
—That first year, I didn’t let a work day go by without reading Jay.
When I was 3 years old, a drunk taxi driver ran a stop sign and hit the back of the baby blue Volkswagen bug in which I rode on the way to preschool.
We were 4 toddlers strapped across the back seat that day—two to a seatbelt, in the 1972 carpool, as then was the way.
I must have had my mother tell me the story of that morning a million times. It became a bedtime ritual.