Writing under Pressure

Completing law school writing assignments is tough, but at least you usually have about two weeks to get them done. In practice, those two weeks may suddenly become twelve hours. What do you do when facing such a tight writing deadline in practice?

Anna Hemingway and Jennifer Lear’s recent article, “Tips for Lawyers Writing in a Time Crunch,” published in the fall issue of ABA Litigation [Find it] offers some tips and tricks for  streamlining the writing process.

When working under pressure, you’ll still follow the basic writing steps – researching, organizing, refining, all the way down to tuning up and polishing. But the authors point out that you’ll be adding two additional steps: taming expectations and turning over responsibility.

When you tame expectations, you realize that what you did in two weeks in law school you’ll now complete in a matter of hours. Your expectations for quality don’t change, but your mindset does.  Likewise, you realize that you’ll need to turn over responsibility for certain parts of the writing, such as researching and editing. In law school, you probably don’t have this luxury, but in practice you may.