My jaw dropped.  She nailed it.  She explained to our class not just where—but how—this 1L’s memo could be more synthesized, more precise, and more logical.  I could not have done it better. 

But remarkably, she was herself only a 1L.  In fact, she was the 1L who authored the memorandum only a week earlier.  And even more remarkably, several of her colleagues did the same thing with their own work in that same session, only a few weeks into the semester.

Each year growing up, my family did the same thing for Thanksgiving. We’d invite a group of families over to our house, everyone would bring the same set of dishes (candied sweet potatoes!), we’d have a Kids Table and a Grown-Ups Table (Kids Table was always more fun), and then, after dinner, we’d play games. 

This article offers a potential tool for legal writing professors seeking to quickly orient students to the positive power—and potential peril—of using generative artificial intelligence tools wisely in the practice of law. This article describes a verified, helpful classroom exercise designed to engage students in the critical evaluation of memos or briefs generated by various AI systems. Through this exercise, students quickly grasp pitfalls of the tools, while they also start to understand that different AI products suit different purposes.

One of the places I find the most joy in teaching legal writing is problem development—writing compelling factual scenarios that give students interesting legal issues to work through is rewarding and fun.  The best prompts will motivate students to really jump into their role representing their client and encourage them to think about the “big picture”—how the law ties into social, political, and economic structures in society at large.  Much has been written about the best ways to do this in the context of litigation assignments (briefs, memos, etc.),

I hate page limits. I also hate overlong legal writing, but I don’t think page limits are the best solution for that problem. Overlong legal writing happens for three main reasons: wordiness, writing about irrelevant issues, and providing too much rule explanation or rule application on relevant issues. Much has been written on the first of these,[1] and we all work with our students on avoiding the second by teaching them how to identify relevant issues.

Most students are unpleasantly surprised by their first set of law school grades. After working diligently and expecting whatever worked well in undergraduate classes to work in law school classes, many well-intentioned students are disappointed that they did not get an A on their first legal writing assignment. I was. I came to law school expecting to receive glowing praise on my writing assignments. After all, I had a lot of undergraduate academic writing experience.

Motions. Briefs. Oral arguments. For students interested in a transactional career, a typical legal writing semester focused on persuasion sometimes feels like it is centered on inconsequential litigation-style assignments. What many students do not realize, however, is that many skills learned in a persuasive semester, including through the context of litigation-style assignments, are transferrable to transactional contexts and help students prepare for careers in transactional practices.