Legal Writing and Research

Sim­ply put, great lawyers are great writ­ers. Our legal research and writ­ing cours­es and skills train­ing will teach you how to find the law, how to ana­lyze it accu­rate­ly for an employ­er or a judge, and how to com­mu­ni­cate it per­sua­sive­ly to help your clients achieve their goals. Hon­ing these essen­tial skills will let you set your­self apart.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills and writ­ing well are cru­cial to lawyers. Michi­gan Law’s Legal Prac­tice Pro­gram offers a strong skills-based foun­da­tion in the first year that is rein­forced through­out the rest of your legal edu­ca­tion. Our goal is to pre­pare you to prac­tice at a high lev­el from the day you graduate. 

To help you devel­op these essen­tial com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, the Legal Prac­tice Pro­gram will be a cen­tral com­po­nent of your first year. It reflects our com­mit­ment to begin prepar­ing you for the prac­tice of law start­ing on your first day of law school. By lim­it­ing class size to around 20 stu­dents, the pro­gram offers indi­vid­u­al­ized and inter­ac­tive instruc­tion in legal research and analy­sis, legal writ­ing, oral advo­ca­cy, nego­ti­a­tion, and trans­ac­tion­al drafting. 

You will have many more oppor­tu­ni­ties to build your skills. We offer numer­ous upper-lev­el elec­tives like prac­tice sim­u­la­tions, clin­ics, and extern­ships, as well as extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties like stu­dent-run law jour­nals and lit­i­ga­tion and trans­ac­tion­al com­pe­ti­tions. These all help rein­force the skills you’ve already learned and let you devel­op new ones