What exactly are employers asking for when they request a writing sample?
They are asking for a self-contained excerpt of legal analysis that you wrote alone, in a format a practicing lawyer would recognize: an office memorandum, a section of a brief, a bench memo, or a substantive portion of a scholarly note. The default expectation is 5 to 10 double-spaced pages unless the employer says otherwise. Anything longer will be skimmed; anything under about four pages usually cannot show enough.
The sample is a work product test, not a personality test. A reader wants to know whether you can be handed a research question and return something usable. That means the piece needs a discernible legal question, the governing authority, application of that authority to specific facts, and a conclusion the reader can act on. A reflective essay, a policy op-ed, a college thesis, or a personal statement is not a writing sample.
Attach it as a single PDF with your name and page number in a header on every page. Pages get separated. A reader should be able to pick up page 6 and know whose it is.
Where should the sample come from?
For 1Ls applying in December and January, the answer is almost always your fall legal writing memo. That is what everyone else is submitting, and employers know it. Clean it up, incorporate your professor's feedback, and fix every citation.
By 2L and 3L you have more options, and the ranking generally goes: an excerpt from real work product you drafted at a summer job or clinic (best, because it is real and shows you can work), a moot court or appellate advocacy brief, a journal note or comment, a seminar paper with genuine doctrinal analysis, or your 1L memo (still acceptable, but stale by 3L).
Two cautions. First, avoid anything heavily edited by others — a note that went through three rounds of journal editing is no longer purely yours, and you must disclose that. Second, avoid politically inflammatory subject matter when you do not know who is reading. You cannot know the judge's or hiring partner's priors, and a sample on a hot-button constitutional question invites a reaction to your topic instead of your writing.
How long should it be, and how do you excerpt properly?
Follow the stated length exactly. If a posting says 10 pages maximum and you send 14, that is the first data point the employer has about whether you follow instructions. If no length is stated, target 8 to 10 pages.
To excerpt a longer document, cut at a natural boundary — one complete argument section, or the discussion of one issue — rather than stopping mid-analysis at the page limit. Then add a short explanatory cover page in front of the sample.
The cover page should be half a page and answer the reader's questions before they ask: what the document is, when you wrote it, for what course or matter, the procedural posture and the facts needed to follow the analysis, that this is an excerpt of a longer document and what was omitted, and what editing or feedback you received from anyone else. Also state whether names and identifying details have been changed or redacted.
- "This is Section II of a summary judgment brief I drafted in June 2024 during my summer associate position. It was filed in [court] after revisions by a supervising attorney; the version below is my draft, before their edits."
- "This is a predictive memorandum written for my first-year Legal Practice course in November. I received written comments from my professor on an earlier draft and revised it accordingly."
- "Client and party names have been changed and the underlying facts altered to protect confidentiality. The legal analysis is unchanged."
What do the ethics rules require before you use work product from a job?
Get written permission from your supervising attorney before you send anything you wrote at a job, clinic, or externship. This is not a courtesy. ABA Model Rule 1.6 makes client information confidential regardless of whether it is privileged or publicly available, and Model Rule 5.3 makes supervising lawyers responsible for the conduct of nonlawyer assistants — which is what you were. A firm's own policy may flatly prohibit sharing draft work product, and many do.
Public filing does not solve the problem. A brief filed on a public docket is available to anyone, but your decision to circulate it as a self-promotional document, identified as your work on a particular client's matter, is a separate act that your employer gets to approve or refuse. Ask anyway.
If permission is granted, redact or fictionalize: change party names, alter identifying dates and locations, and cut anything that reveals strategy the client would not want disclosed. Note the redaction on your cover page. If permission is refused, do not negotiate — go back to your legal writing memo.
Do not overstate authorship. Presenting a document as "mine" when a supervisor rewrote half of it is a misrepresentation, and misrepresentation in a job application is exactly the kind of thing that surfaces in bar character and fitness review. Describe your role accurately and you have no exposure.
What are employers actually evaluating?
Organization first. Readers look for whether the analysis moves in a logical order, whether each section announces its conclusion up front, and whether the roadmap matches what follows. A well-organized average sample beats a brilliant disorganized one.
Then application. The most common failing in student samples is a long, correct recitation of the law followed by two sentences applying it. Reviewers want to see the ratio inverted: the rule stated efficiently, then sustained analogical reasoning from the facts of decided cases to the facts at hand, including the counterargument.
Then mechanics, which function as a proxy for care. Citation errors are the fastest way to lose a reader, because a hiring attorney concludes that if you were careless in the document you chose to be judged on, you will be worse in real work. Practitioner documents use Bluebook Bluepages conventions — citations in citation sentences and clauses within the text, not footnotes. Academic pieces use footnotes under the whitepages rules. Match the convention to the document type, verify every pincite, and check short-form citations after you excerpt, because your first full cite may have been in the part you cut.
How do requirements vary by employer?
They vary substantially, and the variation is driven by what the employer needs you to be able to do on day one.
Judicial clerkships are the strictest. Applications go through OSCAR (oscar.uscourts.gov) for most federal judges, and many judges specify length, format, and whether the sample may have been edited by anyone else. Some ask explicitly for an unedited sample. Judges want to see predictive, objective analysis — the kind of writing a bench memo requires — so a balanced memo often outperforms a one-sided advocacy brief. Read each judge's individual requirements in OSCAR; they are not uniform.
Large law firms in OCI frequently do not ask for a sample with the initial application, then request one before or after a callback. Have it ready anyway. Government honors programs — DOJ Honors, agency programs — usually require a sample with the initial application in the fall of 3L and often set a firm page limit. Public interest organizations and prosecutors' and public defenders' offices tend to prefer a persuasive sample or something showing you can write fast under real conditions.
Because of this spread, maintain two polished samples: one objective memo and one persuasive brief excerpt. Then you are never rewriting under deadline pressure in October.
When should you prepare it?
Finalize a submission-ready sample before winter break of 1L year, and refresh it each summer. The realistic failure mode is not that you lack a document; it is that an employer asks on Tuesday for a sample by Thursday and you send something with stale citations and a professor's tracked comments still in the file.
Before it goes out: strip all metadata and comments, confirm the file is a PDF named something like Lastname_WritingSample.pdf, reread the cover page for accuracy, and re-verify at least the citations you are least sure about. Then have someone else proofread it. You cannot see your own typos in a document you have read twenty times.
Your legal writing professor and your school's career services office will both review a sample. Use them. Legal writing faculty in particular are the people who know what a reader in your market expects, and reviewing samples is part of the job.