New York Law Journal: Law Schools, April 27 2009

The Rankings

What Frims Want

A firmwide director of recruiting agrees, indicating that law schools could better prepare students for law firm life by teaching “professionalism and staff management skills, and how to interact with people in person, not just via email and instant message.” As Wanda Woods puts it:

“Some new attorneys could use instruction in the areas of emotional intelligence and general people skills. Their interpersonal communication with clients, colleagues and supervisors would be greatly enhanced.”

I Write…
Therefore I Am

Another common refrain from our respondents is the need for law students to be taught how to write.

“Very few associates
can write well,” says one;

thor of “On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction” ( Harp-erCollins, 2006) and adjunct faculty member at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, puts it this way:

“Writing is thinking on
paper.” If a lawyer’s writ-
ing is muddled, clients
may assume his/her
thinking is, too.
Duke Law
School is to be
applauded for
going beyond
the typical first-
year legal writing class
by offering a variety of
courses, including “Writ-
ing for Federal Litigation,”
“Writing/Drafting Legis-
lation” and “Writing for
Publication” as well as
several workshops, e.g.,
“Writing from the Reader’s
Perspective” and “Legal
Writing: Craft & Style.”

“Young lawyers need better writing skills,” notes another. A bankruptcy chair of an AmLaw 100 firm adds:

“Over the years, I’ve heard a pretty consistent refrain of ‘writing needs to improve’ or ‘I had to rewrite the entire document.’ Constructing grammatically correct sentences is not

the problem. Rather, the ability to organize facts and principles in a crisp, logical way is what’s lacking in many newcomers to the firm.”

The frustration is understandable given that “the pen is the tongue of the mind,” as novelist Miguel de Cervantes noted. William Zinsser, au-

One of our survey participants suggests that law schools implement a much broader revision: Instead of requiring one big memo project in legal research class, they should require lots of little memos. “This would provide more practical experience for students, since that is what they’ll be expected to produce in the real world.”

This idea was given considerable attention in a 2005 article, “English as a Second Language—or Why Lawyers Can’t Write,”

by Harold P.
Southerland, Pro-
fessor Emeritus
at Florida State
University College
of Law (St. Thomas
Law Review, Vol. 18,
p. 53, 2005–2006). His
primary recommenda-
tion was for law schools
to require that briefs be
written on a daily basis.

“There is no better way to learn than forcing oneself to distill, in one’s own words, what a court did in a particular situation. Writing about these things steadily improves facility in using and manipulating language.

“Instructors could pick one case from each day’s assignment, and ask students to produce written briefs. The instructor could critique a handful, for both accuracy and writing technique, and return them to the students. Then choose another

handful the next day.

I envision this practice taking place in all courses throughout law school. In their later years, students might be asked to write précis of material in their casebooks or synthesize a line of cases, or support or attack a particular approach. This would make it easy to spot students with writing problems and refer them for remedial work.”

Professor Southerland believes law schools need to do more:

“Law is a house of words, utterly dependent on language. Other than integrity, it is hard to think of any quality more vital to a lawyer than literacy.”