Legal Writing as Project Management
Author | John Hollander |
Pages | 23-60 |
legal writing as project management
chapter two
Legal Writing as Project
Management
ideas and techniques that treat
legal writing as a project. ere is no fundamental dier-
ence between how any professional tackles a problem and
how it is tackled by a lawyer. Lawyers and other profes-
sionals must consider their work in light of the needs of
their clients, and after completing a careful analysis, they
must tailor their work to the circumstances of the case.
e dierence lies in how their conclusions are com-
municated. Lawyers represent clients in dealing with the
outside world, whether it be opposing parties, transaction-
al counterparties, institutions, courts, or otherwise. When
they do so, they must communicate what their client has
to say as the client chose to speak or act through a lawyer.
at lawyer should speak in a way that best transmits the
client’s position. Lawyers are by nature a methodical pro-
fession; they build an argument — a position — based on
an accumulation of factual and legal knowledge. en they
arrange that knowledge into a presentation to persuade the
audience of the correctness of their conclusion. e process
by which lawyers convert that accumulation into a persua-
sive presentation is a project that requires management.
How do professionals manage their projects? First,
they must have something to say. If a junior lawyer re-
ceives a memo that requests legal research into a thorny
issue facing a senior lawyer, how does that junior lawyer
go about satisfying the request? Additionally, that jun-
ior lawyer has to assemble the various components of
the presentation, from facts to law to conclusion. is
handbook provides some of the tools necessary to com-
municate that opinion or conclusion eectively. is
chapter deals with the project as such — as a project to be
managed — and also introduces several subjects that are
explored in greater detail in later sections.
Project Management
itself an art form. Within the
legal profession, each area of legal practice considers its
approach to be distinct from all others. Examples are that
an estates lawyer may approach a contested probate ap-
plication dierently from a family law practitioner with
a domestic contract to draft. Also, because lawyers are
trained to see each client as unique, they approach each
case dierently. Despite this aversion to “one size ts all,”
lawyers do consider drafting projects from a global per-
spective. ey ask:
• Who is the client?
• Who is paying for the task?
• Who are the other parties?
• Who will read the document and why?
• What will be the legal impact of the document?
legal writing as project management
• What rights or obligations are at stake?
• What will be the future use of the document?
• How likely is it to be altered in the future, and by
whom?
• What disputes could arise?
• What are the consequences of any given course of
action?
ere will be other pertinent questions that depend on
the purpose of the document and other factors. e law-
yer — as a professional — puts the interest of the client rst
within the connes of the lawyer’s duty to the regulator
and to the judiciary. Seen as a project management exer-
cise, the lawyer tackles the writing project in distinct stages.
The process
develop a persuasive argument consists
of these basic steps:
. Start with your mandate (your instructions). What
are you supposed to do?
. Conduct your investigation (research, document re-
views, and interviews) until you can meet the require-
ments of the project.
. When your investigation is complete, identify the
central idea or thought that you want to communi-
cate. Record all the logical steps that prove that idea.
Earlier in this handbook, we called this your “theory.”
. Perform the legal analysis that best establishes the
point. You learned how to do this in law school.
. Flesh out the progression of points into a narrative
format that is suitable for the circumstances.
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