Dear 1L: Notes to Nurture a New Legal Writer, Amanda Dealy Haverstick (Writing Law Tutors 2024), 417 pages

Law students often find the first year of law school a turbulent time. The beginning of law school marks a transition into a new professional identity and the pursuit of new goals. It’s a big commitment of time and money. Many students must relocate and find housing. Schedules and routines change.

Then, once students get to law school, they must figure out how to navigate it. They’ll be assigned cases to read before they understand the difference between trial and appeal, or between cases decided on their pleadings versus their merits. They will grapple with unfamiliar subject matter, like intentional torts and diversity jurisdiction.

And when students dig into the work for their legal research and writing course, many find that the writing skills that got them to law school won’t serve them well anymore. Instead, 1Ls must learn a new, technical, and non-intuitive form of writing, plus a labyrinthine system of citation. Soon enough, they’ll probably take on oral argument as well. It’s a lot to assimilate quickly.

Enter Amanda Dealy Haverstick, a practitioner-turned-legal-writing-coach, with her new book Dear 1L: Notes to Nurture a New Legal Writer. Haverstick reorganizes several years’ worth of her LinkedIn posts into an easy-to-read volume and uses them to advise new law students about how to manage their first year of school—particularly their legal research and writing course. Following an outline similar to that of the school year, Haverstick addresses issues that students often face as they adjust to their doctrinal courses and learn the basics of legal research, analysis, and writing. The fall semester material is mostly conceptual; the spring section focuses more on writing mechanics, including style and revision.

Dear 1L is easy to pick up, and I think many 1Ls will find that it meets them right where they are. Haverstick does not presume that her audience knows anything about legal writing; she explains foundational concepts before delving into details. She also makes her guide easy to read. Its material is laid out in just over 100 short chapters, and most are just a few double-spaced pages written in a conversational tone. A chapter or two at a time is plenty for the reader, even a seasoned one; the book includes too much detail to absorb in one go, but just the right amount to read in five-minute chunks.

Dear 1L acknowledges that the first year of law school, and especially the process of learning legal writing and analysis, often is overwhelming. Haverstick explains that students will need to organize their time and minimize the mental load that they will face.^[1] She thinks outside the box about all of these things; for example, she recounts eating the same breakfast and lunch every weekday during 1L, simply so she didn’t have to decide what to eat.^[2]

Haverstick admonishes students to take the lead on becoming better writers.^[3] She explains what they need do differently than they have in the past, and why changing their approach will help them succeed in law school.^[4] For example, she points out that students will no longer aim to write enough material to satisfy a minimum length requirement, as they did in college; they will now aim to fit under a maximum length requirement.^[5] They also must make the problems they solved look easy, not impress their audience with complexity as they may have done in the past.^[6] Both points will help orient students to their task—and while managing length may become habit out of sheer necessity, remembering to keep things simple will serve 1Ls well throughout their careers.

Having set students’ expectations for a sea change in their writing, Dear 1L shifts to instruction. In a particularly helpful section, Haverstick walks students through the process of writing their first legal memorandum.^[7] She reminds students to consider their audience, especially its likely knowledge of the case students are discussing (zero), its goals (to extract information), and its state of mind (busy and distractible).^[8] She describes what legal analysis is, recognizing that students may not fully understand it in their first few weeks.^[9] She also provides simple instructions for skills that take time to perfect: conducting research that will find everything students need, sorting research results, and getting something onto a blank page.^[10] I would have enjoyed hearing Haverstick explain, in her straightforward way, when legal citation is appropriate; it, too, is unfamiliar to many students in the fall.^[11] But on the whole, her memo-writing guidance seems like exactly what students will need when they’re approaching a deadline and realize that they don’t totally understand a big-picture concept.

In later chapters—which Haverstick intends for students to read in the spring semester, while they’re writing their first brief—she provides tips on sentence composition, writing style, and editing.^[12] These sections offer more writing instruction than most 1Ls can absorb and implement all at once. But if students incorporate even a few of Haverstick’s tips, such as varying sentence length^[13] and omitting sentence-openers that supply no substantive meaning,^[14] their writing likely will stand out as a bit more seasoned than their peers’. And they can carry this part of Dear 1L into practice, sharpening their writing skills as they go.

For some students, oral argument is a graded component of their legal writing course. Dear 1L includes four pages of astute oral argument preparation tips,^[15] but Haverstick does not start from zero here. Students will need to know what oral argument is, and how and why courts use it, to make the most of her advice on this topic. As with citation, I think Haverstick would explain the basics clearly, and I hope she will add to her argument advice in the future.

Finally, throughout Dear 1L, Haverstick intersperses short sections of broadly applicable law school advice. She addresses topics such as how to prioritize work, how to handle cold calls in class, and how to respond to “gunner” classmates’ showy ambition.^[16] Other, more detailed, sections of the book focus on preparing for law school in the summer before classes start,^[17] and students’ first search for a legal job.^[18] In the latter section, Haverstick points out that important legal writing attributes (“clarity, brevity, and simplicity”) all apply to effective job application materials.^[19]

Haverstick’s tone is consistently calm and reassuring. She tells students that they are capable and can navigate the challenging currents of first year: “You’re a highly competent individual”^[20] and “an excellent student.”^[21] She says: “I’m thinking of you and cheering you on!!”^[22] On some levels, this feels artificial—surely she doesn’t know who will read her book—but students, in a sea of others who are all rising to the same challenges, do sometimes forget their own skills. And Haverstick’s gentle chapter about first-semester grades provides perspective: not much differentiates one grade from another, and first-semester grades “reflect nothing about how excellent a lawyer you will be.”^[23]

It’s October as I write this—just about time for 1Ls to take midterm exams and upload their first memos. The writing process is always tough the first time. I’m sure students are pulling a lot of late nights and writing on weekends to get it done.

I think Dear 1L will shine brightest at this uncertain, stressful time of year. It will remind students that they’ve got this, help them check their structure, and give them tools to fit their document under the page limit—all with a little extra sparkle for their writing. For this reason, I will happily recommend it. No matter how much of the book students choose to read, or when they choose to read it, they will better understand legal writing—and they probably will run across a warm reminder that they have done difficult things before, so they can manage law school too.^[24]