Common Mistakes Law Students Make Writing Legal Memos
TLDR: Most first year memo problems come down to burying the answer, misreading the assignment, or treating IRAC as a rigid template instead of a thinking tool. Professors and supervising attorneys can spot a rushed memo in the first paragraph. Fixing the structure and the habits behind it matters more than fixing the prose.
Starting With Research Instead of the Question
A lot of students open a memo assignment and go straight to Westlaw or Lexis before they’ve actually pinned down what they’re being asked. That’s backwards. You end up with three hours of research notes and no idea which cases actually answer the client’s question, because you never wrote the question down in a single sentence first.
The fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Before touching a database, write out the legal question you’re answering, in one sentence, the way a partner would say it out loud. “Can our client terminate the lease without penalty given the water damage clause?” Not “issues relating to lease termination.” That single sentence becomes your filter for every case you read afterward.
Skipping the Facts Section Because It Feels Obvious
Students who know the file well often assume the reader does too, so they rush the facts section or leave out details that later turn out to be the whole reason a case applies or doesn’t. If a fact matters to your analysis, it needs to appear in the facts section before it shows up in your discussion. Otherwise the reader hits a fact in your IRAC section that they’ve never seen before, and now they’re rereading instead of following your argument.
Treating IRAC as a Formatting Requirement, Not a Reasoning Tool
IRAC gets taught as a structure, so students treat it like a form to fill in. Issue, rule, application, conclusion, done. But the format only works if each section is actually doing its job. A rule section that just quotes a statute without explaining how courts have interpreted it isn’t a rule statement, it’s a citation with extra words.
The application section is where most memos fall apart. This is where you’re supposed to take the facts and run them through the rule, and a surprising number of students just restate the rule and restate the facts next to each other without connecting them. If a reader can’t tell why fact X satisfies element Y of the rule, the analysis hasn’t happened yet, it’s just been described.
Conflating “Application” With “Summary”
There’s a specific version of this mistake worth calling out separately. Students summarize a case (facts, holding, reasoning) and then move to the next case, without ever explicitly comparing that case’s facts to their own client’s facts. A partner reading this has to do the comparison themselves, which defeats the entire point of hiring someone to write the memo.
Burying the Bottom Line
Legal memos are read by busy people who need the answer fast, then the reasoning if they have time or doubts. Students trained on essay writing tend to build up to a conclusion at the end, the way you’d write a persuasive essay. That’s the wrong genre. A memo should tell the reader the answer in the first paragraph, then spend the rest of the document justifying it.
If someone has to read to page four to find out whether the client can terminate the lease, the memo has already failed, regardless of how good the legal reasoning on page four turns out to be.
Hedging Every Sentence Into Uselessness
Related problem: students worry about being wrong, so they hedge every conclusion into mush. “It appears that the client may possibly have a viable argument depending on how the court interprets the clause” isn’t a conclusion, it’s a shrug with citations. It’s fine, expected even, to note genuine uncertainty or a close call. It’s not fine to hedge a clear-cut issue out of caution.
Ignoring Counterarguments Until They’re Forced
A memo that only presents the client-favorable reading of the law isn’t useful to the attorney who has to defend that position against opposing counsel. Skipping counterarguments doesn’t make the memo more confident, it makes it less reliable, because the reader now has to go find the weaknesses themselves before they can trust your conclusion.
Address the strongest counterargument directly, explain why it doesn’t change the outcome (or does), and move on. This single habit tends to separate memos that get used from memos that get rewritten.
Writing for a Grade Instead of a Reader
Ultimately, the biggest shift that improves student memos isn’t a rule of legal writing at all. It’s remembering that somebody with limited time is going to read this document to make a decision. Every paragraph should earn its place by helping that person understand the answer faster, not by demonstrating how much research got done. Once that mindset clicks, most of the structural mistakes above tend to fix themselves.
