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Legal Writing: Getting It Right and Getting It Written
For good legal writers, the need to build expertise and address new challenges never ends. Whether you are collaborating on your first appellate brief, supervising new interns, teaching a legal writing class, or just working to improve your own writing, this book is for you. This edition explores the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on legal research and writing. New entries address how lawyers can incorporate its strengths and avoid its pitfalls. Because of the breadth of AI’s effect on legal writing, this edition addresses AI’s benefits and hazards throughout in the scores of topics where it may come into play. Thus, when you turn to a topic, you can be assured that the ongoing effects of AI have been taken into consideration.
Also infused throughout the text are updated approaches to gender references and the hazards of using social media. Looking past ephemeral trends in electronic media, this edition offers advice on how to adjust your filing and writing habits to avoid disastrous leaks and unwise statements. In response to the ever-increasing time pressures you face, it answers your questions quickly and provides suggestions to help you refine your research and writing processes so that you can be more comfortable, confident, and efficient.
As with previous editions, this edition helps you resolve incidental questions, review your own and others’ documents effectively, and develop an individualized approach to legal writing. Organized alphabetically, it is a desktop source that provides the concise answers you need for questions about grammar, usage, punctuation, and other technicalities so you can get back to more important matters. It also provides in-depth guidance on broader topics, such as analysis, scholarly writing, readability, and research.
This valuable resource also helps you develop over time as a legal writer. What sufficed in undergraduate studies can become inadequate in law school and may fail in practice. Year by year, lawyers must achieve more, becoming more prolific, more productive, and perhaps more profound. This edition will help you get your legal texts written—and right.
Imprint: West Academic Publishing
Series: Coursebook
Publication Date: 03/12/2025
Mary Barnard Ray, University of Wisconsin Law School
Jill J. Ramsfield, University of Hawaii School of Law
CasebookPlus™
This title is available in our CasebookPlus format. CasebookPlus provides support beyond your classroom lectures and materials by offering additional digital resources to you and your students. Anchored by faculty-authored formative self-assessments keyed to our most popular casebooks, CasebookPlus allows students to test their understanding of core concepts as they are learning them in class – on their own, outside of the classroom, with no extra work on your part. CasebookPlus combines three important elements:
- A new print or digital casebook
- Access to a downloadable eBook with the ability to highlight and add notes
- 12-month access to a digital Learning Library complete with:
- Chapter questions keyed to the casebook
- Black Letter Law questions (available in select subjects)
- Subject area review questions for end of semester use
Leading digital study aids, an outline starter, and audio lectures in select subjects
Students can still utilize CasebookPlus digital resources if they’ve purchased a used book or are renting their text by purchasing the Learning Library at westacademic.com.
With CasebookPlus, you can customize your students’ learning experience and monitor their performance. The quiz editor allows you to create your own custom quiz set, suppress specific quiz questions or quiz sets, and time-release quiz questions. Additionally, the flexible, customized reporting capability helps you evaluate your students’ understanding of the material and can also help your school demonstrate compliance with the new ABA Assessment and Learning Outcomes standards.
Designed as a desktop reference for legal writers, the seventh edition of this book explores generative artificial intelligence’s impact on legal research and writing. New entries address how lawyers can incorporate its strengths and avoid its pitfalls. This edition adds new entries and updates reference material and guidance on improving legal research and writing techniques and approaches. This alphabetized reference addresses common questions that arise in legal research and writing and offers a large index with cross-references under each entry. Covering issues small and large, it offers quick, reliable answers.
Dozens of new entries in this edition address the following topics, among others:
- Using generative artificial intelligence in research and writing
- How to incorporate artificial intelligence wisely in the research process
- How to write prompts for effective use of artificial intelligence
- How and when to use artificial intelligence in composing and reviewing writing
- How to minimize the risk of AI hallucinations
- Making the best use of technology in research and writing
- How and when to remove metadata from files that will be used by others
- How to factor in link rot when using websites for research
- How to keep files secure
- Handling misinformation and disinformation in researching and writing
- Keeping pace with accurate use of gender in writing, including the best ways to honor both clients’ and readers’ preferences
- Working well with clients so that the best, most accurate information is used
- How to counsel clients effectively
- How to interview clients to get the best results
- Managing time and volume of documents ethically and accurately and knowing how to respond to a range of readers and speak to a range of audiences
- Keeping accurate records
- Using “Reply to All” ethically and carefully
- Giving effective PowerPoint presentations
Learn more about this series.
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