The Legal Writing Companion

The Legal Writing Companion is a practical, helpful guide for the new legal writer, designed to address common problems and demonstrate how and why to make effective choices to solve them. The second edition offers additional examples based on a complex federal statutory issue to supplement the first edition's common law examples. The book continues to receive high praise from student users, and the second edition features a student-written introduction.

Organized by eight common "problem" areas, the book uses two fictional case files to work through a series of problems and includes samples of both strong and weak writing choices. Chapters 1-3 identify and discuss common challenges during the prewriting stage, including the transition to writing a full first draft. Chapters 4-6 focus on organizing legal analysis, writing and explaining legal rules, and applying law to facts. In the second edition, these chapters include an expanded discussion of the process of rewriting and revising a draft. Chapter 7 discusses problems and solutions related to the smaller components of legal writing, and Chapter 8 troubleshoots common polishing errors, from overuse of legalese to common citation problems. There are also four complete/annotated memos in the Appendices to pull together the themes presented in the text and show multiple models of successful finished products.