Bloomberg Law can help you understand and apply legal issues to your legal memo mission so that your final product addresses all relevant points from the beginning. The subject of the note is the question: how can the relevant law be applied to the essential facts of the research problem? Thus, the question referred for a preliminary ruling is analogous to the question or question put in a case document. The question referred for a preliminary ruling should be sufficiently narrow and objective. This is usually a sentence that often begins with: “If..” or “Is..”. Both the legally relevant facts and the rule in question are taken into account in the question. While questions are usually framed in such a way that they can answer yes or no (or probably yes or probably no), sometimes they can`t (for example, “Has a retailer made a binding offer under New York law if…?”). Always include the name of the relevant jurisdiction, such as New York, the Second Circuit. This is the heart of the memo. Here, you need to educate the reader about the applicable legal principles, illustrate how those principles apply to the relevant facts, and consider possible counter-arguments to the primary line of analysis you present.
One last important reminder: an office memorandum is a predictive statement of the law. You write not to convince a court, but to predict how a court would apply the law to the facts of your situation. Therefore, you need to maintain a objective tone and do not forget to address all the counter-arguments. Legal notes are incredibly versatile and useful. Depending on the size of your company and your field of activity, they can serve as a communication pillar when interacting with your colleagues, customers, partners and judges, among others. A reliable legal note template ensures that you always have a clean and readable structure to start with. At the same time, you can reduce your overall writing time. Often, lawyers and other lawyers will want to cite more than one court decision, law or other legal source to support their argument. A list of two or more citations is called a string citation. One cannot simply devotionally cite all the sources that support an argument – the authorities must be quoted in a certain order in a channel quote.
If one authority is more important or authoritative than the others, it should be cited at the beginning of the string citation. Keep in mind that the busy and legally trained reader in this section will appreciate the brevity, so try to present only those facts that are legally important or that are necessary to clarify the issue. At the same time, remember that the memo should be a standalone document that can fully inform any colleague in your law firm who can read it. Therefore, the “Facts” section should always include a complete and consistent recitation of the relevant facts, whether or not the main reader of the note already knows them (unless you have been instructed to do otherwise). If you approach your assignment following the approaches recommended in the sample legal note below, you are more likely to find a grateful supervising lawyer, provide a better work product, reduce the number of drafts needed to arrive at a final product, and most importantly, satisfy the client. However, as we explained above, a legal memo template is just an ideal starting point. Honing your writing skills is crucial given the different audiences that read your legal memos. By improving your legal writing skills, you can write faster and easier. Most of the memo is the discussion section. In this section, all legal analysis as well as any application of the law to the facts giving rise to the problem is carried out. As explained above, all lawyers have an ethical duty to inform the court of their authority that contradicts their position; Therefore, it is important that the domestic legal memorandum addresses all aspects of an issue, including the conflicting authorities. You are writing this in favor of another lawyer who has asked you to answer a particular question and is waiting for an answer to that question.
Your reader may have a general knowledge of the law you are discussing, but may not be familiar with certain cases (or, if applicable, legal provisions) that you have deemed relevant to the analysis. Therefore, as you write, keep asking yourself: will the reader be able to follow my analysis? Have I organized my analysis to follow all the steps of the “CRRACC” paradigm (conclusion-rule-statement-rule-explanation-application-counter-argument-conclusion)? If your organizational plan skips all stages of your thought process (for example, if you go directly from a simple statement of the rule to an application of your facts without first discussing in more detail the cases from which the rule is derived), your reader will not be able to follow your analysis and ultimately will not find your work useful.