The ability to write well may be the most critical tool in an attorney’s arsenal—and unlike a knack for the oratory, writing is a must-know for every area of legal practice, from trust and estates law to white-collar criminal defense.
Most law students are already fantastic writers. In fact, your love of, or skill with, words may be one of the primary reasons you pursued this line of work in the first place. But the kind of writing you’ve been trained to do is unique and, to the non-lawyer or no-longer-practicing lawyer, kind of burdensome. In legal writing, you build rock-solid positions from the ground up, utilizing a basic format accessorized with citations, voluminous footnotes and awkward sentence structure. You verify points as you go. And sometimes it goes on for a long, long time.
