Welcome back to the Law School Toolbox podcast. Today, we are starting a four-part "Quick Tips" series in which we will complete a full legal writing makeover. Your Law School Toolbox hosts are Alison Monahan and Lee Burgess, that's me. We're here to demystify the law school and early legal career experience, so you'll be the best law student and lawyer you can be. We're the co-creators of the Law School Toolbox, the Bar Exam Toolbox, and the career-related website CareerDicta.
Alison also runs The Girl's Guide to Law School. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review or rating on your favorite listening app, and check out our sister podcast, the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. You can reach us via the contact form on LawSchoolToolbox.com, and we'd love to hear from you. And with that, let's get started. Welcome back. This episode is Part 1 of a four-part series called "Legal Writing Makeover".
In this complete series, we will take a poorly written piece of legal writing and transform it into legal writing A+, one section of IRAC at a time. We will also give you some general legal writing tips that you can use to self-edit your legal writing. But before we jump into our makeover, let's set up the situation. You are responding to a short-answer question on an exam that asks whether there is an enforceable contract against the buyer.
The facts indicate that the buyer and seller agreed via phone, that the seller would sell the buyer a boat for $400,000. However, after this phone conversation, the buyer sent a signed letter to the
"I have run into some financial difficulty and will not be able to honor our agreement to buy your boat for $400,000." The seller now wishes to enforce the contract against the buyer. Again, the prompt asks: "Is there an enforceable contract against the buyer for the sale of the boat?" Let's take a look at our response to this question that could use a makeover.
"The issue is whether there is a contract for the sale of the boat. The formation of a contract requires a mutual assent, which involves both a valid offer and acceptance, consideration or a bargained-for exchange involved, and a lack of any defenses to the formation of said contract. The UCC Article 2 is the presiding contract law concerning any sale of moveable goods.
The UCC likewise has a statute of frauds provision, which requires that a contract concerning moveable goods of over $500 be written on paper in writing. Here, the buyer and the seller had a conversation on May 1st, where they agreed to the sale of the boat for $400,000 and agreed that the seller would deliver the boat to the buyer's house on May 4th, which the buyer would then pay the purchase price. This agreement indicates a mutual assent and a consideration, and has no defenses to formation.
However, because the boat is a movable good over $500, therefore the statute of frauds requires the contract to be in writing. The buyer signed a letter and mailed it to the seller, indicating he did not want to buy the boat. This letter satisfies the statute of frauds requirement and would be an enforceable contract against the buyer." Whew! Okay, let's start with what is working in this answer. The author generally used IRAC to structure the answer.
The author also stayed mostly on topic and eventually answered the exact question in the prompt. Unfortunately, it is a bit of a hull to get to that answer. So, let's break this down using IRAC and make it easier to immediately spot that this author knows the answer to the question. Let's start with the "I" in IRAC, or issue statement.
"The issue is whether there is a contract for the sale of the boat." Well, kind of. Remember specifically what the prompt asks: "Is there an enforceable contract against the buyer for the sale of the boat?" Whether the question asks about enforcing the contract against the buyer or the seller may be an important detail in a question that raises the statute of frauds.
This brings us to our first general legal writing tip: When you are writing your issue statement, make sure to capture all details that are relevant to your analysis. Here, we are only analyzing the enforceability of the contract against the buyer. And we must make sure to include that detail as part of our issue statement. For example, we could amend this issue statement to say: "The issue is whether there is an enforceable contract against the buyer for the sale of the boat."
That issue statement is a perfectly accurate re-write of the question prompt, but is there a way to make it better? Absolutely! Here is the bad news - if you are writing a law school exam or a bar exam answer, the grader is unlikely to award points for accurately re-writing the question. So, rather than wasting time writing a sentence that does not earn points, let's talk about how to earn points, or at the very least, earn the trust of your grader with your issue statement.
This brings us to our second legal writing tip: Use your issue statement to identify the specific issues that you must determine to answer the question prompt. If you must determine more than one issue, break each issue into individual mini-IRAC sections. We will talk more about how to use mini-IRAC in Part 2 of this "Legal Writing Makeover" series. But let's identify the major issue or biggest potential problem with this contract.
It is subject to the statute of frauds, so we must determine whether we have a writing that satisfies the statute of frauds for the purposes of enforcing the contract against the buyer. Given the buyer's follow-up letter to the seller, you could write your issue
"The issue is whether the buyer's letter to the seller is a sufficient writing to satisfy the statute of frauds and enforce the contract against the buyer." Again, the simpler issue statement re-writing the prompt is not wrong, and it is a fine issue statement to which to resort if you are pressed for time. But you will likely earn more points and make a better impression with your grader by writing an issue statement that identifies the specific major issue raised by the prompt.
That wraps up Part 1 of our "Legal Writing Makeover" series: how to fix your issue statement. We hope that this episode helps you understand how to earn points on an exam by writing specific issue statements. In Part 2 of our "Legal Writing Makeover" we will continue working through the answer given above, tackling our rule statement. Rule statements are extremely important, because they impact the rest of your IRAC. So, make sure to look out for Part 2 of our "Legal Writing Makeover"
how to fix your rule statement. If you enjoyed this episode of the Law School Toolbox podcast, please take a second to leave a review and rating on your favorite listening app. We'd really appreciate it. And be sure to subscribe so you don't miss anything. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to myself or Alison at lee@lawschooltoolbox.com or alison@lawschooltoolbox.com. Or you can always contact us via our website contact form on LawSchoolToolbox.com.
Thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon!