take a memo

Well, those who have done law school will understand this post, it's all about the Memo. The 'office memo' appears to be a standard part of a lawyer's practice. In the memo, you review the facts, identify issues, analyze the law as it applies to the specific situation and provide a conclusion. This is also known as a legal opinion. From what I understand, as a lawyer I will be writing these for the rest of my working life (inset joyous cheer here).

Interestingly enough given how critical the office memo appears to be, we only do them twice in law school, in first year, in the first three months when no one has a clue what they are doing. As you may have guessed, I just completed and handed in my second memo, so this post may have a bitter, post-memo feel.

Writing the memo is a frustrating experience becuase you are not given any direction on how to write a memo, just told to do it. Upper year students will pass on words of wisdom such as "the answer is in the textbook" and "don't expect to do well, they don't tell you how to do it for a reason", but the typical type-A competitive law student stereotype clicks in and you want to do well, so you spend days researching trying to find that "one case" that will rule all the others. All this work goes into the 8-10 pages we have to write in each memo, which combined are worth a total of 16 marks in the final mark of one class. There must be a better way than the trial by fire, we teach thinking, not skills approach of most universities.

It's too bad really, because I have probably learned more doing the memos than in class. Anyways, the memo is dead, long live the memo!