When I left private practice to start teaching legal writing in the fall of 2019, I never thought much about how to take attendance. But teaching during a pandemic has been full of disruptions and unexpected surprises, and here I was, scrambling for a head-count system that would work during a school year unlike any other. Some days, class was fully remote. Other days, it was hybrid, with half the class attending in person, and half remaining remote. No telling how long that would hold either, as change seemed like one of the only constants.

While you can never be certain you’re accurately tracking changes in student performance over time (damn you, Heisenberg!), it’s uncontroversial to note that today’s students often struggle to master the metacognitive skills required to write. Thus, today’s LRW teacher must help students develop their own practice of writing, in addition to teaching the specifics of legal writing. Online teaching during the pandemic has only underscored the value of helping students develop practices they can use outside of class to increase comprehension and productivity.

Professors—and perhaps law professors more than most—can usually rely on the architecture of the place, the costuming of the participants, and even the nature of our audience for at least some of our success in the classroom. In a normal year, I know I benefit from the kind of people in the room: a captive audience who have been rewarded for sitting quietly and attentively for sixteen years. I benefit from the students’ relationships with one another: they enliven and enrich the class discussion and the classwork.

When we set out to plan our fall remote legal-writing course in summer 2020, we found ourselves in a bit of a panic. We covered it well on the surface, sharing exercises and tips with colleagues to ground ourselves and show that we had concrete ideas for the fall. Beneath that surface, however, we each frantically researched

Of the many types of correspondence that lawyers write, demand letters are one of the most common, but demand letter assignments seldom appear in legal writing courses. Adding a demand letter to a legal writing course creates opportunities for the professor to reinforce persuasive writing skills, to discuss ethics and professional responsibility, and to teach professionalism and civility. This essay walks through these benefits and discusses how a professor can add a demand letter assignment to an existing course.

The two most prominent citation manuals for legal writing, the Bluebook and the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, tell us that we may place full citations to legal authority in a

Most students come to law school with a vague sense of the acronym IRAC (the traditional legal writing format of issue, rule, analysis, and conclusion), and some reluctant willingness to use it: they know they are graded on writing in IRAC form and they want to get good grades, so they try to use it.

Each fall, I tell my incoming class of law students that succeeding at legal writing will require them to shed many of the writing habits that they acquired in college. I tell them that the process of learning to be an effective legal writer will start in my class but will continue throughout their careers. I tell them not to get discouraged because learning to write like a lawyer is hard work.

I’ll admit it: I was afraid to try peer review in my Legal Practice class. I’ve been teaching legal analysis, writing, and research for 17 years. I know all of the benefits of peer review. I’ve read plenty of scholarship about why and how to do it well. I have space in my syllabus to incorporate it into my teaching. But I’ve been reluctant. I worried that students would be averse to sharing their work with a classmate. I worried that the exercise would embarrass students who felt self-conscious about their writing.