The genre of legal writing is an intimidating one. You see it in pop culture or in high stakes situations. Even if you are not planning to become a lawyer, there are many transferable skills and rhetoric components that are vital to writing outside the genre. Professor Andrea Yelin worked as a law librarian for nine years and also taught legal research and writing to law students at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. In Autumn 2026, Professor Yelin will be teaching WRD 321: Writing in the Legal Profession. Whether you want to go to law school or learn how to write with more authority, this course could be valuable to you. Read on to learn more about the course from Professor Yelin herself.
What is the day-to-day like for a student taking Writing in the Legal Profession?
Even though it’s asynchronous, students still have to keep up with the work, and there are a series of building blocks, and the goal in the class is to explore the different ways that lawyers use language to support points. Whether it’s to inform an audience, persuade an audience, or to make an audience reader understand the next steps, the three basic goals, we spend a lot of time building towards what we call the objective memo. It requires students to understand how to read cases, to summarize cases, and then to use that information to inform the reader in a very set format. That’s part of legal writing; there are a lot of built-in audience expectations and we explore a lot of that in the class.
Even if you aren’t planning to go into law, why is this a valuable course for WRD students?
It uses specific resources, but there is a huge rhetoric component, because we talk so much about purpose and audience and formatting arguments and supporting our points, and that’s pure rhetoric in many ways. Place and law and rhetoric are very closely aligned when it comes to purpose-driven writing, audience-focused writing, or determining the audience, clarity, structure, using mechanics, writing mechanics to achieve a goal.Many students actually come away from the class thinking, oh, I’m better equipped to deal with issues in my life, like writing to comment or writing to Comcast or Xfinity, whatever it’s called now, or dealing with my landlord or asking for more financial aid, they’re just, they feel better equipped at that.
That’s great. So, besides the objective memo, what other writing assignments are they getting to do in practice?
We actually do two other big assignments. One is to write a demand letter, and that’s that’s our exercise in persuasive writing, where we tell someone that they need to do something by a certain date, or there are consequences, and there’s legal and factual support for that demand, because you can’t just make things up like, oh, you know, you’re you’re annoying me. You have to stop doing something. It has to be a real reason, and then our justifiable reason. And then the other part of the class deals with contracts, and we all enter into contracts every day. We just don’t realize it, but we do. Like when you go to Starbucks and you order coffee, in many ways, that’s a contract. You’re saying I’d like an almond milk no foam latte for $4 or whatever it is, $7 now, and that’s a contract. They’re making the offer, you’re accepting it, you’re telling them you’ll pay for it, and then they provide it, so we negotiate and draft very simple contracts in the class.
What would you say to a WRD student who was apprehensive to sign up for either not planning to get into law or having no experience?
We start the class with absolutely no expectation of any foundational knowledge of law. Everyone starts at the same place, so there’s nothing that sets you behind if you don’t have any experience in that area even if you don’t want to go to law school. Some of my absolute best students were education majors who took the class because they knew that they would have to write reports and IEPs for their students, and they felt that this would help. The other thing that goes into the class that I think is really important for students to know is that I wrote the book that we use, and because I wrote the book, I was able to obtain five copies of the book and put them on reserve in the library, plus there’s a digital version, an online ebook that’s available through the library, so if you don’t want to buy a textbook, you don’t have to buy a book for this class.
Course Carts are now open! Register for WRD 321 to take Writing in the Legal Profession this Autumn.