I would suggest making legal writing a three credit class with a much more substantial amount of time spent on search strategy, drilling citation, and dealing less with concrete (spoon-fed) memo assignments and more with amorphous projects that may involve looking at various fields of law and learning to pull everything together.

Doing the research I've done so far makes me realize just how difficult and laborious civil litigation is. The strategies, the analogies made, the different types of law you may have to look over to buttress your arguments, can all be incredibly complex. Sometimes, it feels like you may be looking forever for something that doesn't exist in the hopes that you'll find something helpful in the next click and other times you only realize after the fact that something you saw long ago is actually helpful to you. (I would like to insert a caveat here - and that is that I work for a non-profit civil liberties organization, so my experience may be unique and perhaps other types of legal work is, in fact, much more approachable and really is just like researching a particular type of tort, etc.)

I would say that law school really hasn't helped me much in my job - not skill-wise, anyway. I think having a background in civil procedure, con law (very much so, considering the type of litigation I'm working on), etc. is helpful, but I can't say that I'm now somehow a better writer or a more analytical thinker.

-- KateVershov - 02 Jul 2008