Legal Writing Help Resource Guide

This publication focuses on writing and advocacy in appellate courts. It is well suited for use in an upper division appellate advocacy or advanced writing course or moot court program, or as a primary or supplemental text for first year legal writing courses that focus on appellate advocacy as the pedagogical model to teach legal writing skills.

Briefs are a combination of legal reasoning and good story-telling. The aim of every brief is always the same: to persuade. This means that there are fundamentals that must be adhered to in order to create a good brief, and big mistakes must be avoided. The book can utilized as an outline or a refresher for any type of brief that must be written, whether it is a main brief, reply brief, or sur-reply, and whether it s a lower court or appellate brief.

Former Judge Edward D. Re and litigator Joseph Re lead the reader through each step of the legal writing and oral argument process highlighting and addressing the nuances of trial practice as only a veteran judge and lawyer can.

Good legal writing wins court cases. Bryan A. Garner explains the art of effective writing in 100 concise,practical, and easy-to-use sections. 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. In Garner's view, good writing is good thinking put to paper. Throughout, he shows how to edit for maximal impact, using vivid before-and-after examples that apply the basics of rhetoric to persuasive writing. Filled with examples of good and bad writing from actual briefs filed in courts of all types, The Winning Brief also covers the appellate rules for preparing federal briefs.

This overview of the use of litigation in dispute resolution is particularly well-suited for use in an introductory lawyering course. It instructs students on efficient preparation, proper form, and effective presentation of arguments. Content covers interpreting facts and developing core theory, legal research, writing a legal research memorandum, writing a brief, and oral argument.

Through hypotheticals, outlines, and writing samples, Legal Writing by Design shows how to transform thought into writing. It explains why writing is simply a by-product of reasoning - a footprint of thought.

This book is designed to structure the process of writing a first brief and organizing a first oral argument on appeal. The book assumes that its typical user is a student addressing an appellate moot court problem during the student's first or second year of law school. The book further assumes a basic understanding of legal research and writing, including an understanding of citation form.

Persuasive Oral and Written Advocacy: In Trial and Appellate Courts offers detailed coverage of appellate practice as well as trial-court motions practice. it takes the reader from start to finish through the processes of writing, editing, and presenting effective written arguments, and also preparing and delivering persuasive oral arguments. to familiarize prospective lawyers with essential skills and concepts, this title includes: a step-by-step guide to preparing and editing effective written and oral arguments. The text demonstrates gives practical advice on oral argument in appellate and trial settings with an emphasis on the judge's perspective, which needs to be considered when preparing an argument.

When attorneys begin their latest motion or brief, they face a predictable set of questions and concerns, including how to start, how to draft winning headings, how to tell a story when the record is dry and dense, how to neutralize bad facts, how to be persuasive when recounting the governing law, how to confront adverse authority, how to analogize cases without drowning in detail, how to distinguish authority without sounding defensive, and how to make a brief interesting without seeming corny or coy. The answers to these questions are more science than art, and the best advocates -from Thurgood Marshall to John Roberts - have far more in common with each another than with their less-adept contemporaries. In Point Made, author Ross Guberman aims to break down the work of great advocates into a step-by-step writing strategy with practical examples. Each chapter focuses on a fundamental challenge that brief writers face, and includes an overview incorporating insight from judges, followed by specific practice pointers in checklist form and annotated examples of how prominent advocates have resolved the challenge in a variety of trial and appellate briefs.

The Question Presented offers both instruction on successful brief writing and examples of outstanding briefs. In The Question Presented, the authors not only provide guidance on writing techniques, they present actual briefs chosen by judges for their persuasive force. Notes from the authors highlight the best points, and each set of briefs is followed by the opinion of the court, demonstrating in a concrete way the impact made by the persuasive tools employed in the briefs. This book opens with The Art and Science of Appellate Advocacy, where the authors explain how to utilize every part of the brief as a persuasive tool, providing valuable guidance on how to state the issues presented, how to organize arguments, and how to make even the section headings work for their clients.