Well, the practice brief is finally done. It was a ton of work, I haven't even thought about totaling up the hours invested in it. We sent it off a few hours before the final deadline, and so far all the interested parties seem to have received it, and are more or less satisfied.
Actually, we will be scheduling an appointment with the team coach shortly. He will be sure to let us know how well we did (or didn't) do.
Speaking of writing, I have an interview for an unpaid internship coming up shortly. It is a research assistant type position. I am pretty excited about the possibility of the topic, it is really an area that I think I could see myself doing some serious work in the future. The real point of this story, though, is that it required my creating a writing sample.
Writing samples are just what they sound like, a sample of your writing! The idea is that, as has been discussed here ad inifitum, legal writing is a different beast from other types. Therefore, prospective employers like to get an idea that you know how to do it before they hire you. This is especially true for a lot of internships, where you will primarily be tasked with looking up an obscure legal topic, and then trying to convey the whole law in a few pages to a busy partner who doesn't have the time to really learn it themselves.
My first year of law school, I did five writing assignments. The first was a closed memo for my first year writing course. This, unfortunately, would never work. While my legal analysis was actually pretty decent, the paper itself was a bit of a mess. Half of this is my fault for really doing awful, but a lot of it was simply because 1Ls don't know any better.
The second was an open memo for the same class. This one has potential as a writing sample, except I never got a graded copy back from my professor, since we handed it in at the end of the semester.
The other major paper was a lengthy appellate brief I did for the second half of my first year writing course. This one was out because of the same half and half rule from earlier. On the one hand, I could have done a bit better of a job with the second element. On the other hand, I don't think even the professor fully understood the second element or how we were supposed to approach it in light of the assignment.
So that leaves two other possibilities, my Moot Court brief and my law review write-on. Well, the law review one, while not bad, was never scored. So basically, that left Moot Court brief. This was from the competition to get on a time during the winter last year. The good part about this is 1) it was some pretty tight legal writing, 2) it was the ideal 6 pages and 3) it was already pretty heavily edited by yours truly. So I decided to put it in blue book format (yeah, we used a modified style guide for the competition) and send it off.
No lie, I spent a solid 8 hours cleaning up the six pages. It wasn't all bad, I have just really grown as a writer from last year. I found so many improvements to make, and I am proud of the final output. But when potential jobs are on the line, wow, do you look at everything a little more closely. I suppose this is good, it means that whenever I am actually in practice, I have a very deep place I can go to get the best product out there. But when it is a Friday and you really just want to have some fun, it is not fun at all.
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