Comparison of IRAC briefs, Part 2

Posted on December 12, 2012 by legalparaeagle

As promised in my earlier post, here are two IRAC (Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion) briefs from later in the semester. You can see how I’ve got a better sense of what needs citations and what does not, as well as gotten better at condensing the rule and the verdict down as far as possible without losing the essential information.

The first is from my Torts class, and presented a particular challenge as there were 5 separate issues being contested in the appeal.

Here is the feedback I received from Prof. Chase on my work:

The second is also a Torts brief. I feel this one represents my best work in distilling a lengthy opinion down into the shortest possible document that still covers all the relevant facts.

And the audio feedback for the Turner v. General Motors brief:

Articles of Incorporation

Posted on December 10, 2012 by legalparaeagle

One of the last assignments during Introduction to the Law was to compose articles of incorporation for a for-profit entity. I was frankly stunned at how short such a document could be–stunned enough that when I found the instructions on the Colorado Secretary of State website I thought it must have been an error. But no! It was entirely correct.

The forms provided on that website, by the bye, are available only in non-fillable/non-copy-paste-able PDF format, forcing one to either print them out and fill in the blanks by hand or to transcribe the necessary language into a word processor.

And the Department of State is not the only governmental agency that seemingly encourages electronic filing but fails to format their digital documents properly. The Federal District Court for Colorado uses all .rtf or WordPerfect document types, despite the ubiquity of Microsoft Office and the availability of non-proprietary formats. The El Paso County Combined Courts have family law forms with checkboxes made not with macros but with Wingdings. It took me a good half an hour just to figure out what key combination in Wingdings produces something approximating a ticked checkbox.

Suddenly instruction in how to apply styles in MS Word seems a bit more important.

Legal research cheat sheet

Posted on November 16, 2012 by legalparaeagle

A list of web resources for fast, thorough legal research I put together for Introduction to Law. It was more than a little disturbing to me as a former librarian and FOIA officer that the state of Colorado farms its public statutes out to LexisNexis rather than managing their own website. The heavy reliance on the three dominant legal research companies (Lexis, Westlaw, and Loislaw) also made me uneasy. Call me a hippie or a hacker but I do believe that some information is meant to be free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.