About LAWriters
LAWriters is a group of lawyers, writing experts, and editors who specialize in training other lawyers, judges, and business professionals to become strong, confident writers and efficient editors. Our methods are comprehensive, sophisticated, and proven. Our team offers you backgrounds in law practice and law teaching, as well as journalism, business, graduate English, and even theology. That background means that our instructors:
Each have more than 20 years of writing training experience
Have conducted over 1,000 trainings
Are currently the most active presenters of programs to federal and state judges
Meet the Team
Dedication. Expertise. Passion.
John T. Salatti
President of LAWriters
John T. Salatti, Esq. has been president of LAWriters since he founded it with Professor Timothy Terrell of Emory Law School in 1996. For more than a decade now, he has overseen LAWriters’s nationwide team of writing experts as they have provided a full range of writing programs and services to firms, courts, corporations, government agencies, and individuals across the country and abroad. Under his management, LAWriters has more than tripled its client base and revenues.
Mr. Salatti did his undergraduate work at Cornell University. After seven years in banking and mental health advocacy, he entered Emory University’s Law and Religion Program where he received his J.D. with Distinction (the Law School’s highest accolade at that time) and his Master of Divinity Magna Cum Laude.
Mr. Salatti has taught effective legal writing for two decades. As part of the LAWriters team, he has taught all over the United States for top 100 law firms (e.g., Skadden Arps and Choate Hall & Stewart) and very small firms, corporate legal departments (e.g., Southern California Edison), all manner of state and federal agencies (e.g., DOJ, FEC, FTC, CFTC, SEC, DOI), and a variety of courts both state and federal. Beyond his national experience, Mr. Salatti has also taught foreign courts systems and law firms, including The High Court of Trinidad and Tobago (and various lower and specialized courts), the Supreme Court of the Republic of Georgia, the Supreme and Trial Courts of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, among others.
His writing training career started when he was a law student at Emory Law School where he was a Dean’s Fellow in the Research, Writing, and Advocacy Program for four years. He also served on the Emory Law Journal for four years, two of them as an Associate Editor. From the Journal, he received the Red Pen Award for Excellence in Editing and the first Distinguished Service Award. While at Emory, Mr. Salatti received extensive writing training as a summer clerk for the Honorable Stanley F. Birch, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
For LAWriters, he teaches almost all of the seminars and workshops that the company offers, and he oversees the Intensive Personal Feedback program. As part of that program, he provides very individualized feedback to attorneys about their own writing in both oral and written form. To offer this level of service, Mr. Salatti is backed by a team of editors who are based coast to coast.
In addition to directing LAWriters, Mr. Salatti is a private practitioner (licensed in Georgia and the District of Columbia), mediator, and mediator trainer. And in 2006, he was elected to public office in Washington, DC where he served the Bloomingdale neighborhood as Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner. He was re-elected for a third term in November 2010 with over 96% of the vote.
Timothy P. Terrell
Law Professor
Timothy P. Terrell, LAWriters’s corporate and spiritual co-founder, has recently retired from teaching both as professor of law at Emory University School of Law and as a principal at LAWriters. Nevertheless, Tim remains at the heart of all we do at LAWriters. Tim created the methodology we teach over 35 years ago and co-authored with Stephen V. Armstrong over 30 years ago the text that serves as LAWriters’s bible, Thinking Like a Writer, now in its 4th edition.
Tim joined the Emory faculty in 1976. But even in his earliest days at Emory, he was interested in communication and in training. Two examples. First, early in his tenure at Emory, he also served for several years as the director of professional development at King & Spalding in Atlanta, assisting the firm in designing and implementing a comprehensive training program for the firm's associates. Second, while studying under the first of two Fulbright Scholarships, Tim earned a Diploma in Law from Oxford University, where his thesis essay involved aspects of linguistic theory and political philosophy.
Regarding legal writing training, Terrell taught in almost every state of the United States at law firms, government agencies, and courts. He conducted for two decades the writing and editing portion of the training program for new appellate judges at NYU Law School’s Institute of Judicial Administration. In addition to presenting programs around the country to law firms and bar associations, he taught internationally. He served as the primary consultant on legal writing to the international association of law firms called Lex Mundi and has conducted programs at its member firms around the world.
Tim’s influence at LAWriters cannot be understated and remains much appreciated.
Steve Armstrong
Talent Management
Steve Armstrong is a godfather to LAWriters in that the method that he co-developed with Tim Terrell has served as the foundation for all that we do from our earliest days.
For more than 30 years, Steve has taught writing programs for lawyers and judges in the U.S. and Canada. His programs for lawyers have been conducted for law firms, in-house legal departments, and such government agencies as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. He conducts the opinion-writing segments of the U.S. Federal Judicial Center’s orientations for new district, bankruptcy, and magistrate judges, as well as programs for Canadian judges.
Beyond his writing programs, Steve has led professional development and talent-management programs at major law firms for more than 20 years. Since establishing Armstrong Talent Development in 2009 (http://www.armstrongtalent.com/), he has provided training programs and consulting services for partners and associates in many of the leading law firms in the U.S. and Canada, focusing in particular on improving the leadership and management abilities of the firms’ lawyers. During that time, he has guided firms to think strategically about managing their talent, has taught programs on managerial and leadership skills, and has designed and implemented a wide range of programs and policies. He has served as chair of the Professional Development Consortium, the professional organization for in-house legal educators, and as co-chair of the ABA Committee on Business Law Education.
