How to Write a Legal Memo

An office memo is predictive. You are writing to a supervising attorney or a file, not to a judge, and your reader wants an honest forecast: if we take this position, what happens? That purpose drives every stylistic choice. You state your conclusion up front rather than building to it. You describe unfavorable authority in the same neutral register as favorable authority. You never use "clearly," "obviously," or "the court must find" — if it were clear, no one would be asking you.

Contrast this with a brief. A brief characterizes facts favorably, buries weaknesses, and argues. A memo that reads like a brief is the single most common failure in a first-semester 1L assignment, because the analysis looks confident while hiding the risk the reader actually needs to know about. If your prediction is that your client loses, say so in the Brief Answer and then explain exactly what would have to be true for the answer to change.

Most first-year assignments are closed-universe: you get a packet of authorities and you may not go outside it. Second-semester and clinic memos are usually open-universe, which means research quality becomes part of the grade. Ask which you have before you start.

The conventional format has six parts, though your professor's template controls and some offices use a shorter email-memo form.

Heading: a block with To, From, Date, and Re. The Re line should identify the client, the file, and the legal question in one line — not "Memo."

Question Presented: one sentence, usually in the "Under–does–when" pattern. Under [the governing body of law], does [the specific legal question], when [the two to four most legally significant facts]? Keep it neutral and keep it under about 75 words. If you have three independent issues, you get three questions, each with its own brief answer.

Brief Answer: start with "Probably yes," "Probably no," or "Yes/No," then give the reasoning in three to six sentences. Name the rule and the facts that drive the result. Do not cite cases here in most formats; do not hedge into meaninglessness.

Statement of Facts: past tense, no analysis, no legal conclusions, and no facts that never reappear in the Discussion. Include legally significant facts (the ones your rule turns on), background facts needed for coherence, and unfavorable facts. Omitting a bad fact is a competence problem, not a style problem. Facts come from the client interview, file, or record — not from cases.

Discussion: the substance, organized by legal issue and element, not by case and not chronologically.

Conclusion: a fuller restatement of your prediction, plus any practical recommendations — further facts to investigate, a statute of limitations concern, a settlement observation.

Open the Discussion with a roadmap or umbrella paragraph. State your overall prediction, state the governing rule in full (statute, common-law test, or elements), identify which elements are satisfied or conceded and dispose of those in a sentence or two, and then tell the reader the order in which you will analyze the contested elements. Then follow that order exactly.

For each contested element, use CREAC. Conclusion: your prediction on that element, first sentence. Rule: the legal standard governing that element, stated as a rule and not as a description of what one court did. Explanation: how courts have applied that rule, typically through one or two case illustrations. Application: your client's facts run through the rule and compared to the illustrated cases. Conclusion: restate, with the reason compressed into a clause.

Schools use different acronyms for the same architecture — IRAC, CRAC, CREAC, CRuPAC, TREAT, and others. The variation is real and you should use your professor's version, because rubrics track it. The substantive difference worth noticing is whether the acronym forces a separate rule-explanation step before application; the ones that do (CREAC, TREAT) produce better memos because they stop students from jumping from a bare rule statement to "here, our client..." with no showing of how courts actually apply the standard.

Use point headings for each element in a multi-issue memo. They should be full sentences or at least descriptive phrases, and in a memo they stay neutral: "The Duration of the Entry" or "Whether the entry was substantial," not an argumentative assertion.

Synthesize, do not summarize. If four cases address the same element, extract the principle that reconciles their outcomes and state it as one rule, then cite the cases supporting it. A Discussion that reads "In Case A, the court held... In Case B, the court held... In Case C, the court held..." is a research report, not analysis, and it usually loses substantial points.

When a case needs individual treatment, write a proper case illustration: a hook sentence stating the proposition the case demonstrates, the legally relevant facts, the holding, and the court's reasoning — all in past tense, all limited to what matters for your element. A case illustration about intent should not recount the plaintiff's damages.

Then reason analogically. Say which case your facts resemble and which they do not, and say why the resemblance matters under the rule. "Like the defendant in Smith, who moved the chair moments before the plaintiff sat, our client acted with knowledge to a substantial certainty because..." The comparison must run through the legal standard; two cases sharing an irrelevant fact prove nothing.

Include counteranalysis for every element that is genuinely contested. Present the strongest opposing reading of the authority or the facts, in its best form, and then explain why you nonetheless predict the outcome you predict — or concede that the element is a coin flip. A one-sentence dismissal of the opposing argument reads as evasion.

Distinguish adverse authority on its facts or its reasoning, and flag binding adverse authority explicitly. If controlling precedent in your jurisdiction forecloses the argument, that belongs in the Brief Answer, not on page nine.

If there is no case on point in your jurisdiction, say so and identify what you used instead: persuasive authority from sister states, the trend of decisions, a Restatement section, legislative history, or policy. Note the weight problem candidly. Also flag missing facts — "the analysis turns on how long the recording device was in place, which the file does not state" — because that is often the most useful sentence in the memo.

Cite every legal proposition and every fact you draw from a case. A citation sentence supports a full sentence; a citation clause supports part of one. Give the full citation the first time a source appears in the memo, then use short forms; use id. only when the immediately preceding citation is to the same source, and add a pincite whenever you refer to a specific page.

Which manual governs varies by school and course. Most use The Bluebook, and for a memo you follow the Bluepages (practitioner formatting), not the law review whitepages — that affects typeface conventions, which for court documents and memos generally means italics or underlining rather than large and small capitals. Some programs teach the ALWD Guide, and a few states have local citation rules that displace both. Confirm which one your rubric uses, and confirm whether your professor wants underlining or italics in typescript.

Formatting basics that get graded: single or 1.5 spacing with block-quote indentation for quotations of fifty words or more, a page limit you do not exceed, and quotations used sparingly. Quote statutory language and dispositive phrases of a legal test; paraphrase everything else. Long block quotes signal that you did not do the synthesis work.

Research first and outline the rule structure before you draft a word of prose. Write out the elements as a skeleton, slot the authority under each element, and only then start writing. Most students who produce disorganized memos organized their research by case rather than by element.

Draft the Discussion first. It will change your conclusion. Then write the Statement of Facts, keeping only facts that appear in the Discussion. Write the Question Presented and Brief Answer last, when you actually know the answer — drafting them first commits you to a prediction you have not tested.

Then edit in passes. One pass for large-scale organization: does every element get its own CREAC, and does the first sentence of every paragraph state a conclusion or transition rather than a case name? One pass for citation form. One pass for sentence-level cleanup: cut nominalizations, cut "it is important to note that," fix passive voice where the actor matters. Finally, read the Brief Answer and the Conclusion back to back — if a partner read only those two paragraphs, would she know what to do?