This concise manual guides lawyers, law students, and paralegals through all phases of the writing process, from preparing to write to polishing a finished draft. It offers practical suggestions on outlining and establishing deadlines as well as comprehensive, jargon-free advice on grammar, punctuation, usage, document formatting, editing and proofreading.

Sue "Baylor 1L" writes, "After I got my first (devastating) grade on a legal writing assignment, I turned to the law librarian for recommendations. This was it. It saved my life... or at least my GPA. This is now the only writing resource I use, and only wish I had read it before my first attempt at a legal memo!"

This extremely useful guide for legal writing… presents clear and concise concepts and illustrations for organizing and clarifying what lawyers say in a variety of contexts. This book uses a very helpful format of checklists to improve the writing of all who work in the law: students, practicing lawyers, professors and yes, judges too! -Prof. Carrie Menkel-Meadows, Georgetown University Law Center

This book examines ethical and effective legal writing by providing more than two hundred examples of judges' reactions to errors in lawyers' writing. The cited cases cover errors ranging from serious ethical breaches, like misrepresenting facts, to grammatical and citation errors.

"d critique" writes, "I struggled my first year learning how to write legal memos, and my Professor was no help. Someone suggested that I read this book and it was a life saver... My grades and legal writing improved substantially because of this book; it also helped prepare me for my summer associate positions."