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Do your first draft, get all your stuff out, and then cut a third from it. The best writers take a first good draft and cut a third out of it. ” Lissa Percopo
writing class at GW and has read a lot of writing by young lawyers at her firm. “I have found that when law students think about not only stating but also explaining a rule before they begin to apply it, they internalize it better and conduct a more thorough analysis. I think the ‘E’ is what is most often overlooked, yet it is the foundation for the strong ‘A’ that everyone knows is important.” Writing and analyzing, Ms. Percopo says, are the girders on which lawyers must build their careers. “If you can write a good paper, you can be a good lawyer,” she says. When she teaches, Ms. Percopo stresses “multiple drafts,” she says. “Do your first draft, get all your stuff out, and then cut a third from it. The best writers take a first good draft and cut a third out of it.” Jake Berdine, a second-year law student, remembers his first writing assignment for the class. “I went into GW knowing nothing about legal writing,” he says. “My first assignment was due in midOctober. We started writing it in early September. The issue at stake was whether you can use someone’s likeness in advertising.” The paper was supposed to be a five-page analysis. Mr. Berdine’s first draft was “a 12-page fluffed-up paper. It didn’t have the structure of a legal paper at all,” he says. Fifteen drafts later, he whittled his paper into a concise analysis. He learned the value of editing. “I developed a drafting technique,” he explains. With each new draft, Mr. Berdine combed through the paper looking for one specific wrong, such as the passive voice or using too many words. His next assignment took him 200 hours, but this time he received one of the highest grades. This year Mr. Berdine earned a spot on the GW Law Review, based in part on his writing skills. His writing abilities also secured him a job this past summer 52
GW Law | winter 2014
While clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Mark Taticchi, JD ‘10 (center), conducted a backstage tour of the court for Legal Research and Writing students (left to right) Nathan Castellano, Ramon González, and Bandar Altunisi, and their professor, Karen Thornton.
with the patent litigation group at Apple. “Apple offered me one of two internship positions based on the legal writing skills I gained at GW,” Mr. Berdine says. “At Apple, writing is everything. I write all day, every day.” Phil Schuster, JD ’13, spent a lot of time in the Writing Center his first two semesters of law school. “I really had no experience with legal terminology,” he says. “It was very overwhelming and just hard to grasp, especially with the time constraints. The Writing Center was a great resource for students who don’t quite get what is going on in the classroom setting. Writing classes are fundamental to anything that came after the first semester.” The following year Mr. Schuster was himself a fellow in the Writing Center, as “a mentor for 1L students struggling with the same new legal writing concepts that I struggled with a year before,” he says. His mastery of legal writing caught the eye of Senior Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., after Mr. Schuster’s first year of law school and of a Swiss law firm in Zurich, Switzerland, the following summer, he says. For both jobs, Mr. Schuster, who is now an associate for Sullivan & Cromwell in Frankfurt, Germany, drew upon the lessons he learned in his first-year classes and as a Writing Fellow. In the second year of law school, students have the opportunity