LAWS 543 - Advanced Legal Writing: Online Civil Litigation Drafting

Credits: 3

This course is designed as an online course offering that combines components of two upper-level drafting courses currently offered: Advanced Legal Writing and Writing in Law Practice. The goal of the course is to expose students to the drafting skills private practice lawyers need to handle a case in the course of civil litigation. This class will not deal with trial skills; rather, this course will focus on prefiling and pretrial drafting skills and will simulate a realistic litigation experience in a law firm setting. The course will encourage students to build on the legal writing and research skills they learned in the first year and expose them to documents they will need to produce in practice that are not a part of the first year legal writing experience. Students will learn how to (1) draft common litigation documents; (2) produce clear and concise writing; (3) effectively analyze legal issues; (4) express legal analysis clearly in written and oral communications; (5) conduct legal research in context; (6) critically examine information in its original form and discern information relevant to the litigation; (7) make strategic decisions about litigation based on the client's expressed goals, the facts of the case, and the law; (8) draft a persuasive argument in the pre-trial context; and (9) produce documents necessary to resolve the pending litigation.

Note: A student enrolled in this course may elect to have the course satisfy the skills requirement.

Basis of Grade: Written assignments

Form of Grade: letter

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