The New Legal Writing: the Importance of Teaching Law Students How to Use e-mail Professionally

Kendra Huard Fershee

Anyone who has worked in a legal capacity in the last ten years can attest to the meteoric rise in the use of e-mail as a means of professional communication. Recent empirical research demonstrates that e-mail is the most common method for professional legal communication today. Professor Kristen Robbins-Tiscione researched the decline of the interoffice memorandum as a tool in lawyers' arsenals and the rise of e-mail as a more straightforward and informal medium to convey legal analysis. As Professor Robbins-Tiscione determined through her research, lawyers have retreated from writing formal memos to instead distilling the salient arguments of their legal analysis into an e-mail that recipients can read and share quickly and efficiently. The reality of this change is raising questions in the legal writing community about the usefulness of the traditional written memo and whether legal writing professors should be teaching students how to distill their analysis into this new, shorter, more direct form of legal writing. The discussion has brought about an even more intense need for legal writing professors to address professionalism and effective communication in e-mail with their students.