Legal Writing Coaching
Tom’s legal writing coaching will help your attorneys improve their writing—no matter their experience, existing skill level, or practice area.
Tom works with firms who seek to give their litigation and transactional attorneys personalized, intensive writing support—from junior attorneys to partners. He offers practical frameworks to help your attorneys approach each stage of their writing process, including outlining, writing first drafts, editing, and proofreading. His coaching encourages problem-solving, active learning, and approaching writing with a growth mindset.
Tom’s critiques teach writing strategies and techniques. Line edits alone do not.
Many attorneys merely receive line edits on their drafts because their partners lack the time—and perhaps the patience and teaching experience—to explain why they made their revisions and the writing principles underlying those revisions. But line edits alone do not teach attorneys how to improve their future work, especially because many attorneys—particularly junior attorneys—do not recognize that they should analyze how and why their partners’ revisions improved their drafts.
Tom’s critiques dig much deeper—highlighting concrete writing and advocacy techniques that will help your attorneys hone compelling, polished work product.
“Tom is an amazing writing coach. He not only transformed my writing but also my writing confidence.”
Rachael Bryan
Associate, ArentFox Schiff LLP
Tom provides detailed, constructive critiques that explain writing strategies and techniques that your attorneys can apply to their work—no matter their practice area.
Tom will personally critique your attorneys’ writing to help them learn, apply, and internalize effective writing techniques and strategies. His constructive critiques will do the following for problem areas in your attorneys’ analysis:
- Concretely identify the problem area.
- Explain why the problem undermines the strength of their analysis.
- Provide process-oriented approaches to avoid the problem in their future work.
- Offer extensive revisions of their writing to illustrate how they can apply Tom’s suggestions.
Because Tom externalizes writing principles, your attorneys can continue to meaningfully improve their work even after Tom has finished coaching them. His coaching will help your clients internalize their partners’ line edits because he will empower your attorneys to extract and apply the principles underlying those line edits in their future work.
Tom critiques quickly and efficiently. Because of his experience, he can identify and diagnose writing problems immediately and write quality comments and line edits without needing multiple drafts.
Tom provides principled and constructive verbal feedback.
Tom has coached attorneys for many AmLaw 200 law firms and other elite clients, including the following representative clients.
- Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis LLP
- ArentFox Schiff LLP
- Baker & Hostetler LLP
- Brentwood Law Group PLLC
- Cohen Williams LLP
- Fredrikson & Byron P.A.
- K&L Gates LLP
- National Bar Association, Associate Advancement Academy for Excellence
- Steptoe LLP
- Womble Bond Dickinson LLP
Tom will meet with your attorneys before he starts critiquing their work to establish rapport and learn about their writing process. He then will meet with them after each written critique. Because he provides such detailed written feedback, he will give your attorneys the lead in meetings so they can focus on areas where they need more help or explanation. Tom typically schedules one-hour meetings, but he will meet with your attorneys for as long as they wish.
Tom is personable, patient, and kind. He will work collaboratively with your attorneys to create a safe place where they can learn and grow. He welcomes questions and disagreements because they let him contextualize his advice and suggest how your attorneys might implement their ideas.
Your attorneys can freely contact Tom to discuss writing issues during and after his engagement with them.
Tom is personable, patient, and kind. He works collaboratively with his clients to create a safe place where they can learn and grow. He welcomes questions and disagreements because they let him contextualize his advice and suggest how his clients might implement their ideas.
Tom’s coaching clients can freely contact Tom to discuss writing issues during and after his engagement with them.
Your attorneys will receive exceptional teaching materials.
Tom will give your attorneys the teaching materials that he provides in his writing programs. Some of these handouts illustrate techniques for writing sentences and paragraphs that are clear, concise, and connected. Other handouts provide annotated exemplars that illustrate techniques for organizing and writing persuasive memoranda. Tom offers specialized handouts for his transactional clients too, including handouts and annotated exemplars relating to writing transactional agreements in plain English.
Tom also will create personalized handouts that specifically address writing techniques that your attorneys struggle to apply.
Tom’s coaching will protect your attorneys’ billable time.
Tom will critique your attorneys’ actual work product. This practice ensures that your attorneys are incentivized to give him their best work because their work will be submitted to their partners and clients. And this practice helps protects your attorneys’ time because they will only do the work required by their practice. Tom will ask your attorneys to give him significant memoranda, briefs, transactional agreements, or other client-facing writing. This work will typically be the final drafts your attorneys submitted to their partners before they received edits.
While Tom typically works with attorneys’ own work product, he has also developed a writing curriculum for coaching clients in firms that do not want their attorneys submitting their own work product. This teaching curriculum contains six core writing assignments, with opportunities to expand your attorneys’ learning with more writing assignments. The assignments for this problem build on each other. So for each assignment your attorneys will get more opportunities to practice applying what they’ve previously learned and confront new analytical and writing challenges.
