When I read this I got a wake up call into how I could seriously improve my writing. I think that I have fallen trap to grabbing any case that has a good line. In order to move past that surface level writing in which my network of cases fails to connect and its all just great one-liners: I need to focus on taking the time to collect cases relevant to my research. I also think this mainly points out that good research takes time. Legal research and building a network of cases for a research project takes more than one night right before the deadline.

One way I’ve noticed associative reasoning playing a role in my law school experience is when I try to connect a case we’ve studied in class to a practice problem or exam question. I often attempt to relate the facts of the case to those presented in the question. While this approach can be helpful, it’s more crucial to focus on the rules established by multiple cases and the key issues they addressed. Sometimes, cases may share similar facts, but if I rely too heavily on those surface similarities and overlook the underlying legal principles, I can end up arriving at the wrong answer. For example, my associative reasoning can't be so surface level that I begin associating any new case that involves a house to be a valid contract, etc.

I had no idea what shepardizing was until a couple months ago; however, I think it is one of the most important steps in your research. At the OJ Simpson trial the prosecutor based one of her arguments off of a case that had not been shepardized and she was called out by the judge. The case she based her argument off of had been overturned. She could have saved herself a lot of embarrassment and time spent crafting that argument if she had just shepardized before she relied on the case.

One thing that I always struggle with is that legal problems usually arise from "laymen" but then legal terms of art and complicate concepts are brought in to complicate the problem. One major issue in the legal realm is that the law is not accessible to the average laymen person because they simply do not understand it. I understand that our job as lawyers is to write the legal questions and concepts in legal terms but the explain it to the clients clearly. However, if the legal issues are arising from the laymen, then why do we have to complicate the matter for the public and add in legal terms and concepts that makes the law more inaccessible? I think it's important to keep this in mind moving forward as we all start practicing law The part in this sentence that says "clearly and concisely" is going to be very important when we begin to interact with clients.

I don’t entirely disagree with the author. I totally understand that lawyers need to hone their legal writing skills because it is at the very core of what a lawyer does day in and day out. However, I think it would be a huge cost burden for lawyers to have to achieve another required CLE or what is called an MCLE which is mandatory. I know that most of the time you have to pay for the continued education and most people are not too happy when they are being forced to pay for something that they didn’t have to before. This required MCLE would have to be posed as a valuable investment and not an added expense to the attorneys. Going about that might take some work because I was reading an article about MCLE and the costs of implementation. In this article out of Georgetown Law School by David Schein, it said, that in a 2001 article a study estimates that the total cost of MCLE, including incidental expenses, was at over $440 million. Nearly two decades later, that number could be forty-five percent higher. David Schein, Mandatory Continuing Legal Education: Productive or Just PR, 33 Geo. J. Legal Ethics, 301, 305 (2020). https://www.law.georgetown.edu/legal-ethics-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2020/09/GT-GJLE200005.pdf

When the author mentioned that her search terms did not yield results in Arizona, I became interested in whether similar terms might be more fruitful in Washington. I accessed Lexis and adjusted my jurisdiction to Washington. I conducted a search using all of her terms and found relatively few cases where lawyers were criticized for unclear writing. However, I did come across a few cases involving pro se plaintiffs who submitted "incomprehensible" briefs.

I then refined my search using the term "poorly written" and five cases came up. One case that stood out was, State v. Mendenhall, No. 20146-5-III CONSOLIDATED WITH 21160-6-III, 2003 Wash. App. LEXIS 629 (Wash. Ct. App. May 19, 2003). This unpublished opinion noted that although the judge could discern the lawyer's intended argument, the writing was subpar. While this case cannot be cited, it serves as a cautionary tale. If I were that attorney, I would take this as a wake-up call: while the judge may have managed to understand the argument this time, there's no guarantee of similar leniency in the future. Poorly written briefs could jeopardize a client's case or even lead to its dismissal if the judge cannot easily comprehend the argument.