The Memo

It’s all us 1Ls can talk about: the memo. It’s a right of passage and its mere mention brings shivers to upperclassmen. It’s the culmination of our first semester of Introduction to Lawyering and the largest part of our grade in that class. It’s what we’ve spent the better part of a week working on it’s due Tuesday.

So what do you learn in lawyering? No, it’s not all about making cheesy television commercials or figuring out how much an ad on the front of a telephone book costs. We’re given a hypothetical case and we’re expected to progress through the various stages of litigation while learning how to write and think effectively as lawyers. We use the case to walk us through a guided research project (yes, I now know what all this numbers and abbreviations after a case name mean and I might even be able to find the case in one of those official looking books you see behind the DA’s desk in Law and Order) and now we have to take everything we’ve learned and write an objective memo highlighting what we believe is the most effective argument regardless of what side we’re on. In other words, we get to make our best guess about how a court will rule.

In putting together our objective memo, we have to follow a strict formula and we have to properly cite each source according to Bluebook rules. The Bluebook, for those who are not and have not been to law school, is billed as a uniform system of citations. The problem is that the Bluebook is so convoluted and complex that it’s impossible to follow. It seems like each professor has their own interpretations of what the Bluebook requires which I guess is realistic because different courts want you to cite cases in different ways, so it’s all about finding out what’s expected and then ignoring all the rules in the Bluebook that seem to be to the contrary.

At any rate, my memo will be turned in Tuesday and then, as Hers said, it’s off to the bar so we can forget for a little bit about all the outlining we have to do over Thanksgiving break.

Now back to my memo.