His solution: at the start of the course, Smith provides students with several sample legal memorandums like those written by working lawyers. Guided by a set of instructions and targeted questions, students are expected to detail their responses to various aspects of the memos—thereby relieving them of the burden of having to produce their own memos even as they are laboring to learn what a memo looks and sounds like. Only after several such structured encounters with legal documents are students asked to author their own memorandums.
