What We Do
LAWriters is a group of lawyers and writing experts who specialize in training other lawyers, judges, and business professionals how to become very effective writers, using a comprehensive, sophisticated program that has proven both successful and efficient
1. Skills Development Modules
Having really top-notch writers is what everyone wants. So when you want clients to say "you think like a lawyer but don't write like one," you want LAWriters's Skills Development Modules. Our modules can show you how to "think like a writer" with the same precision and sophistication that you bring to thinking like a lawyer.
LAWriters’s modular design gives you control over the program’s substance, structure, scheduling, and cost. You build a program choosing the modules that will benefit your writers most. The modules can be customized further to meet specific needs.
2. Document Wizard
When you need a brief or report to be exceptional, call the Document Wizard. The Wizard can quickly transform that brief or report so that readers will grasp its message, meaning, and arguments faster and easier and find compelling any factual or legal story it has to tell.
I. Intensive Personal Feedback Program
The most effective form of writing instruction is in-depth feedback on one’s own work product. Building on our principles and techniques of effective writing, LAWriters’s signature program offers extensive, one-on-one feedback on staff work product, but more importantly it teaches business and legal professionals how to organize their material and thinking before they start to type and how to edit their drafts like pros.
This program can be offered as a full-day of consultations with up to eight sessions for individuals scheduled. Or, we can design a program for specific staffers that can be offered either in the office or by telephone.
II. Effective Writing Seminars
We offer two seminars: one for mixed groups of professionals writers and one designed for persuasive writers. We can teach these methods because we have learned them straight from the judges themselves during the many programs we do exclusively for them.
A. Advanced Writing and Editing: Beyond Logic to Coherence & Strength
Designed for any mix of professionals, this seminar’s principles and techniques of effective writing and efficient editing provide the keys to strong written communication.
B. Writing to Persuade
By teaching those who draft the most explicitly persuasive documents the elements of modern rhetoric theory and how to apply them, we show what makes a piece of writing persuasive and how to sway important audiences: judges, legislators, regulators, clients.
III. Skills Practice Workshops
A. Edit Like a Pro
The seminars’ methods are more quickly mastered by having participants apply them to numerous writing samples and by giving them the opportunity to discuss and question revisions during an in-depth, guided analysis. This small group workshop actually teaches participants a step-by-step method to edit. As part of that method, they learn what questions do to ask the document, where in the document to ask them, and what to do with the answers they receive.
B. Editing & Feedback Skills for Supervisors
Building on Edit Like a Pro’s foundation, this workshop teaches supervisors to give truly constructive feedback. These skills will help those edited improve their documents and avoid repeating errors, and will save senior staff from having to rewrite documents themselves endlessly.
C. Start Strong
This unique workshop shows people what to do before they put fingers to keyboard. Start Strong teaches groups or individuals how organize their research and thinking into a useful outline. With the outline, they can then write more efficiently and effectively. That is, they can produce higher quality documents faster and with greater ease.
LAWriters now offers GET IT WRITE seminars to help writers avoid costly tactical and surface errors that undermine their credibility and weaken the impact of their ideas. These courses provide information essential for anyone who handles documents representing your organization.
We offer two distinct GET IT WRITE programs: (1) The Essentials of English Grammar, Mechanics, and Usage, and (2) Writing Effective Business Letters and Memos. The latter is customized to meet the writing needs of the company’s staff and secretaries by using actual letters and memos from your organization.
IV. Get It Write
2. Document Wizard
When you need a brief or report to be exceptional, call the Document Wizard. The Wizard can quickly transform that brief or report so that readers will grasp its message, meaning, and arguments faster and easier and find compelling any factual or legal story it has to tell.
Despite the ability of most any law firm to deliver excellent legal services to its clients, when a firm faces a critical project requiring documents of the highest quality, extra effort is justified. For example, a firm’s concern could be about form — striving for seamless flow among a brief ’s many parts—or it could be nuance and detail—ensuring that the idioms of English are accurately captured—or it could be more substantive—assessing whether the document’s analysis is compelling to a reader with “fresh outside eyes”— that is, an objective reader unburdened by the background and development of the document.
LAWriters personnel provide precisely that kind of final-stage “magic” or diagnosis of a document’s communicative impact. And they can do so quickly—within hours if necessary. Our editors either suggest changes to be implemented or actually edit the document, in either case helping the document convey more effectively the message you and your client intend.