Making Students Practice Ready: Standalone Email and Summary Email Simulations
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6587-272X
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
The Second Draft
Abstract
Legal research and writing (“LRW”) curricula emphasize the importance of efficient and effective communication, traditionally providing students with the opportunity to hone this skill through two lengthy and formulaic assignments: a predictive memo and a persuasive brief. These prompts miss key opportunities to engage students in the practice of thinking and writing like lawyers outside the confines of this formal structure. This is a problem because email research memoranda have become the primary mode of communication at firms among junior-level lawyers. This shift has largely been driven by client and supervisor demands for greater efficiency and concision, and will likely only continue to gain momentum as client demands for efficiency grow with the prevalence of artificial intelligence. Yet despite the ever-rising importance of email communication, some first-year legal writing programs have been slow to adopt email research memorandum explicitly into their curriculum.
Publication Date
5-2026
Recommended Citation
Betsy Byra & Seth Reiner, Making Students Practice Ready: Standalone Email and Summary Email Simulations, 39 Second Draft 1 (2026).
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License