One of the most challenging aspects of being a law student or lawyer is producing legally sound written arguments on a deadline — especially in an area of law that is new to you! But it’s also one of the most fun aspects of being a lawyer (don’t you love a good intellectually stimulating challenge?!), and forms the bread and butter of a legal practice. You’ve got to know how to produce legal work on time. Here are five steps to help you know how.
1. Understand the prompt and type of deadline. Basically, “understand the assignment.” 💁🏾♀️
This seems obvious, but this can be easily missed if you get caught up in immediately trying to tackle the assignment. Before you end up going down a rabbit hole trying to meet a made-up deadline, make sure you understand what is really being asked of you — is this research to be used in a motion to be filed in court, or is this for an internal memo to prep the assigning attorney? Are you supposed to provide an objective viewpoint of the law based on research, or are you tasked with developing arguments to advance a certain position? Knowing the answers to questions like these will help you figure out what type of frame of mind in which you should approach the assignment.
You should also know whether this is a “hard” or “soft” deadline. Sometimes the assigning attorney is giving you a specific date because that is the absolute latest it can be turned in. Sometimes the assigning attorney is giving you a date because that’s the first one that popped into his or her mind that sounded good, but they’re about to be out of the office for three days and won’t even look at what you turn in until they get back in the office next week. Make sure you know whether an assignment deadline is a hard one or soft one, and allocate your energy and speed accordingly.
2. Plan when you’ll do what and, if possible, leave time for the unexpected.
This is another seemingly simple thing that often gets overlooked. Keep in mind that oftentimes in an office setting, someone may come and give you another assignment while you’re already working on one, or stop by to ask you a question that takes 45 minutes to answer, or a meeting lasts for more than an hour and a landmark Supreme Court case decision has been issued and you need to stop everything you are doing to read the opinion. Or maybe the printer is jammed and will take 30 minutes to fix. Hopefully this all doesn’t happen in just one day (haha!), but you can (probably) see where I am going with this: plan for the unexpected. Do not assume that you will have a series of large chunks of uninterrupted time in which to complete an assignment in a day or two. While large chunks of uninterrupted time are certainly the ideal, if you have time to spread out your work on an assignment, do that as well. This helps prevent you from wasting time you could’ve spent making progress, while allowing your mind to get some rest instead of plowing through dense material non-stop because you chose to cram the work just a day or two before it is due.
3. Outline.
You may want to skip this step and just start writing because you are in a rush, and while that could work if you are already very familiar with the subject matter or you have an on-point template to work off of, you probably want to outline some of your thoughts first so you can get the big picture idea of how much you have to cover, where you can cut, and what you may need to beef up before you spend hours writing what you don’t have to. Outlining before you do in-depth research would also be helpful in keeping you on track in the wild world of various issues in case law — but you may have to do some initial research first to know what to include in your initial outline.
4. Research (cursory first for issue spotting, then thorough).
You knew this was going to be on the list! Relevant research includes a variety of sources, including your office’s library/database of prior completed assignments in this area of the law (this should be your first go-to as this is a huge time saver if there is something up to date you can already use!), statutes, and case law searches on legal research platforms like WestlawNext (shoutout to WLN, I was a Westlaw Student Rep in law school!), LexisNexis Advance, or Bloomberg Law. Whichever platform you use, make sure you check if the case is still good law. You don’t want to miss a key seminal case in your haste to meet a deadline that you end up looking like you do not know the basics. It won’t matter if you met the deadline if you did not do it correctly.
5. Write (and edit!).
When writing and editing, make sure you use logical organization for your arguments, proper grammar, etc. I have a lot of tips specific to legal writing, but I will save that for another post on another day (I’ll link it here when I do write it!). However, I will share this writing tip now: use Grammar Girl when you need an answer to a grammar question. The range and depth of answers available here is unprecedented (in my opinion!), and proper grammar is important because even if your law is good, you lose credibility if your grammar isn’t.
I hope you found these tips helpful and will put them to use! Let me know in the comments if any of these tips particularly stood out to you.
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