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The Legal Writing Prep Advantage
Legal Writing Prep Advantage
The Legal Writing Prep Advantage is this course offering students the opportunity to perform seven first-semester law school writing assignments, including three IRAC assignments, and to have four of those assignments critiqued. The course will help you work on becoming a clear, concise, precise and adaptable writer, and demonstrate the type of writing skills necessary to do well in law school.
My philosophy for this course is not to introduce you to everything about law school, or legal writing, because that is impossible to do in a one-week course. Instead the course focuses on what is most important for establishing a strong foundation in legal writing.
Understand, although IRAC is the basic foundation of law school writing, every professor has his or her own take on that structure. Thus, the most important thing this course will teach you is how to competently question professors about writing so that you can adapt your writing to each professor's desires. This will allow you to deliver exam answers structured in a manner that will improve your likelihood of receiving good exam grades.
Legal Writing Prep's goal is to provide its students with a 4-6 week head start on law school so that their transition is quicker, smoother, and more effective. I say this for three reasons.
- Many first semester legal writing courses are only once a week and this course being 5 consecutive days covers the equivalent, if not more than, what you will do in the first 4-6 weeks of law school.
- Repeatedly practicing writing in one 5-day stretch allows important points to sink in instead of being forgotten as they might be when classes are only weekly.
- You will not be distracted in learning legal writing by other activities, such as other courses, that will impede your classmates' learning of legal writing during their first semester.
If you speak to law students, law graduates, law professors, or if you visit the popular law school discussion boards, two basic thoughts emerge regarding legal writing and law school preparatory courses. Those thoughts are that legal writing is the most important class in law school, and that commercial law school preparatory courses are expensive and not very helpful for preparing for law school.
I agree with those thoughts with one exception, Legal Writing Prep is not expensive and is very helpful for preparing for law school. I realize I am bias, so let me explain my position. Additionally, because I am bias, on my testimonial page I include the email addresses of Legal Writing Prep students so that you may contact them directly to ask them about the course.
Legal Writing
Legal writing is the most important class in law school, and writing the most important skill to doing well in law school, because almost all law school tests are essay exams, not multiple choice or short answer exams. A common complaint among first-year law students is that the grades they receive do not accurately reflect their understanding of their courses. Many of these students are correct.
The inconsistency between the understanding of a subject and the grade received for that subject is usually because a student does not possess strong writing skills. In law school if what the professor reads is not only precise in its information, but also clearly and concisely written, a student can have points deducted on an exam even if the answer provides the right information.
As one Legal Writing Prep student stated, "this class convinced me that "it's the writing, stupid!" It doesn't matter how well I know the black letter law, if I can't write logical, concise, and complete analyses of legal questions, then I won't succeed."
Law School Preparatory Courses
If you speak to law students and law professors they for the most part think that many commercial law school preparatory courses are expensive and not very helpful. Although I have never taken one of these courses, the reason many of these courses are not helpful is because of the skill they focus on developing and the skill they ignore.
Besides legal writing, legal analysis is the other skill important for law school success. Legal analysis is the ability to accurately interpret a case's legal theory and apply that theory to fact patterns and scenarios so that you can write clear, concise, and precise answers on exams and assignments.
Many commercial law school preparatory courses review the first-year subjects of civil procedure, contracts, constitutional law, criminal law, and torts. These courses review the cases and law from the most important legal theories of a subject to build students' legal analysis skills. Despite this apparent head start on learning and dissecting law school cases and theories, there is no real advantage to reviewing this information prior to law school.
In every first-year course from day one you will be doing legal analysis. On a daily basis professors will review, discuss, and breakdown cases so that every class will reinforce and expand your legal analysis skills. Within the first four to six weeks of law school you will probably read fifty cases or more, and it is very likely you will become competent at anything done so much. Thus, within a month or so the overwhelming majority of students have strong legal analysis skills, and that is the reason most law professor and law students believe commercial law school prep courses are not useful.
Some commercial courses do offer a one-day legal writing course, but legal writing theory without the opportunity to practice that theory is not sufficient. Legal writing is only effectively learned if your writing is critiqued and in a one-day course it is very unlikely you will submit an assignment to have it critiqued.
Conclusion
The difference between doing well and doing poorly in law school, or an A and B+, is often not the content of the answer, but the quality of the writing. This course is a springboard for you to learn how to develop writing worthy of doing well in law school.
Good luck in law school and I look forward to working with you.
Michael Santana
michaelsantana@legalwritingprep.com
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