Academic Success

Beyond the First Draft helps law students approach the often difficult task of editing their own writing. Each chapter is organized around one of the principles of good writing and begins with an editing checklist for accomplishing that principle of good writing.

With concise and easy-to-follow instructions, a variety of annotated examples, and the clarifying concept of "anchors," the Handbook is a student-centered text that engages and accompanies students throughout the first-year legal writing course, and beyond.
1 e-book copy also available

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 Pre-Writing Handbook for Law Students describes a detailed, systematic approach to the task of analyzing a legal problem. The Handbook is designed to help students focus on and become competent in the process of legal analysis that precedes their work on early legal writing products such as memos, case briefs, and other documents.

Covering predictive writing, persuasive writing, and correspondence, this Survival Guide offers practical tips, tricks, and tactics that are critical to any legal writing assignment. It also includes clear illustrations and solutions to common grammar, punctuation, citation, and style issues.

Each major section of the book starts with an explanation of a core concept of good writing and is followed by numerous exercises. By working through these illustrative exercises, you'll learn how to write concise, powerful sentences and structure them into paragraphs that create clear and persuasive legal documents, letters, and other written communication.

This Short and Happy Guide takes you through the history, meaning, and purpose of legal writing in the American law. You will learn the essential form and substance necessary to craft an inter-office legal memo, helpful ideas for persuasive brief-writing, and tips for excelling in legal writing.

This book provides a ten-step guide to clear, precise, and effective legal writing and analysis. It gives the keys to writing legal memoranda and briefs, organizing analyses, crafting clear and concise sentences, using legal language accurately, using grammar and punctuation properly, and writing persuasively using classical rhetorical techniques.

Persuasive Written and Oral Advocacy gives students a clear and practical guide to legal writing and oral argument, from the selection of a main theme, to the employment of research, language, and speaking skills that achieve a clear, persuasive legal message. Step-by-step, they learn to organize, prepare, and present winning written and oral arguments.

The Winning Brief explains the art of effective writing in 100 concise, practical, and easy-to-use tips. Covering everything from the rules for planning and organizing a brief to openers that can capture a judge's attention from the first few words, these tips add up to the most compelling, orderly, and visually appealing brief that an advocate can present.

This book covers legal analysis, drafting, and advocacy techniques used in preparing appellate briefs, as well as oral advocacy techniques in a discussion that is useful to novices and old hands. Written for practicing lawyers as well as students, the book also includes a chapter devoted to that particular law school exercise known as moot court.

This book's 150 sections explain, in blackletter principles, how to prepare contracts that are both precise and readable. The richly illustrated text is easy to follow, and Garner's improvements on old-style drafting are immediately apparent. Never before has the field of contract drafting been so lucidly, elegantly, and thoroughly explained.

This book is designed to help train law students in the skills needed for successful transactional lawyering. Through carefully designed text and exercises, the book helps students understand and strategically use the different types of contract terms, translate deal terms to precise contract language, use forms appropriately, and spot and resolve ambiguity.

Contract Drafting is a complete how-to guide for all lawyers who desire to hone their drafting skills. The book explains the contract drafting process in terms of content and style, demonstrating through authentic examples how to revise template documents to produce effective and complete contracts that protect the client's interests.

Legal Drafting in a Nutshell provides guidance on producing transactional documents, contracts, instruments, legislation, and regulations that solve existing problems and prevent future problems. The book provides both a large scale, macro overview of the drafting process as well as small scale, micro focused discussion of the mechanics of legal documents at the sentence, word, and punctuation level.