How to Create a Legal Writing Sample

They are testing four things: whether you can state a legal conclusion and prove it, whether your organization lets a busy reader skim, whether your citations are accurate and in the right format, and whether you proofread. The subject matter is close to irrelevant. Nobody expects a 2L to have written about the employer's practice area.

How closely the sample is read varies enormously by employer. Large firms often use it as a downside screen — they open it, read the first page and a random middle page, and look for red flags. Small firms, government offices, and public interest organizations frequently read the whole thing. Judges read it hardest; for clerkship applications the writing sample is often the single most-scrutinized document in your packet. Write for the closest reader you might get.

Default to your 1L legal writing memo or the appellate brief from your spring semester course. Closed-universe assignments are ideal because they are self-contained, they demonstrate the analytical structure (issue, rule, rule explanation, application, conclusion) that employers expect, and they raise no confidentiality problems. There is nothing embarrassing about a 1L memo; it is what most applicants submit, and hiring committees know it.

Better options, if you have them and can clear the permissions, include a memo or brief section written during a summer job or clinic, and the analytical portion of a journal note. Weaker options include seminar papers — they are footnote-heavy, discursive, and read as academic rather than practical — and co-authored moot court briefs, where the reader cannot tell which words are yours. Never submit an exam answer, an undergraduate paper, or anything you cannot vouch for line by line.

Five to ten pages is the standard range. If the job posting states a limit, treat it as a hard cap — clerkship postings on OSCAR routinely specify a page limit, and exceeding it is a self-inflicted wound. If your best document runs long, excerpt rather than submitting the whole thing or, worse, shrinking the font and margins.

Excerpt by lifting a self-contained analytical unit: one argument section of a brief, or the discussion of one issue in a multi-issue memo. Keep the original headings so the structure is visible. Add a two- or three-sentence factual summary at the front — either in the cover note or in a bracketed block — so the analysis makes sense without the omitted parts. Never submit only a statement of facts or a procedural history; the reader learns nothing about your reasoning from it.

Client information is confidential under ABA Model Rule 1.6, and the duty survives the representation under Rule 1.9(c). That duty binds you as an intern working under a supervising lawyer. The work product also belongs to the firm or office, not to you. Before using anything you wrote for a job, get permission — ideally in writing, ideally by email so you have a record — from the supervising attorney, and follow whatever redaction instructions you get.

Redact client and party names, dates, dollar amounts, specific transaction terms, and any detail that would let a reader identify the matter. Replace them with generic placeholders like 'Client' or 'Company A' and note the substitution in the cover note. Anything filed under seal or covered by a protective order is off the table entirely. If redaction leaves the document incoherent, use a school assignment instead.

Judicial internships deserve extra caution. Bench memos and draft opinions are chambers work product, and the Code of Conduct for Judicial Employees prohibits disclosure of confidential information learned in that role. Many judges flatly forbid former interns from using chambers work as a sample. Ask the judge or the career clerk directly; do not assume.

Put a short header block on page one — four to six lines, not a full page. State your name and contact information, what the document is, when you wrote it, the context of the assignment, whether it has been edited by anyone else, and what has been excerpted or redacted. For example: 'Excerpt from a predictive memorandum written for Legal Research and Writing, Fall 2024. The assignment used a closed universe of authorities. I revised the memo after receiving my professor's comments; no one else has edited it. Sections II.B and III are omitted.'

That disclosure is not optional politeness — it is how the reader calibrates. Clerkship applications frequently instruct that the sample must be 'unedited by others,' and misrepresenting the editing history is the kind of integrity problem that ends candidacies. Revising your own document in response to a professor's comments is expected and is not 'editing by others,' but say so.

Deliver one PDF, with the cover note and the document combined. Name the file something like Lastname_WritingSample.pdf. Strip out grades, rubrics, professor comments, tracked changes, and metadata from earlier drafts.

Assume one typo can cost you the job, because at some offices it does. Read the document aloud. Then read it backwards, sentence by sentence, which breaks your brain's tendency to autocorrect. Check the header, footer, and page numbers, which is where errors hide.

Cite-check every authority against the current Bluebook. Documents in practitioner format follow the Bluepages — B10 for cases, B12 for statutes, with citations in the text or in footnotes as the document requires. Journal notes and academic pieces follow the whitepages rules and Table T1 jurisdiction formats. More important than format: run every case through a citator and confirm it is still good law. A sample that relies on a reversed or abrogated decision suggests you do not check your work.

Then attack the substance. Every heading should state a conclusion, not a topic. Every paragraph should open with a sentence that carries the point. Cut string cites down to the best one or two authorities with parentheticals. Address the strongest counterargument — a memo that never acknowledges the other side reads as advocacy in the wrong genre, and a brief that ignores adverse authority reads as naïve.

The recurring killers are typos, formatting inconsistency, unredacted client information, exceeding a stated page limit, submitting a document that opens with three pages of facts before any analysis, and submitting work you cannot honestly describe as your own. Sending an academic seminar paper to a litigation boutique that asked for a brief is a softer error but still signals that you did not read the posting.

One more variation worth naming: what counts as impressive differs by employer. Some litigation employers prefer a real filed brief over a school assignment; some judges specifically want to see a closed-universe memo because it isolates your reasoning from a supervisor's. When a posting states a preference, follow it exactly. When it does not, a clean, well-organized 1L memo beats a messy real-world document every time.