About the Contest
The National Legal Writing Competition invites law schools to submit their strongest legal writing paper for anonymous, multi‑stage, national review. More than just a competition, this project is also designed to build greater consensus around how legal writing faculty evaluate student work by:
- Comparing assessment approaches using a common writing sample based on the same hypothetical legal problem.
- Identifying areas of shared standards and thoughtful disagreement.
- Creating a national database of student writing that can be used for teaching, scholarship, and research.
By seeing how different legal writing faculty assess the same work, we can better understand what works, what doesn’t, and how our pedagogy can evolve.
How It Works
Trial Brief Assignment
- The University of Wisconsin Law School Legal Analysis, Advocacy, and Writing program will provide all participants with a trial brief assignment to use in the Spring 2027 semester.
- The assignment will include all necessary materials, such as transcripts, exhibits, and a bench brief.
- The assignment will also be balanced, so both plaintiff and defendant have good arguments.
- Faculty can decide to assign students all to one side or have students write opposing briefs.
- All participating schools will have students write a trial brief based on this assignment.
School Selection
- Each school selects one (1) brief to submit to the competition.
- The school should use its own internal selection process to choose that school’s brief.
- We will provide suggestions for choosing the best brief winner for your school.
Judging Process
Stage One – Faculty Review
- A panel of Legal Research & Writing professors will review briefs anonymously.
- They will review briefs using a shared scoring rubric.
- The top 5% of briefs will advance as finalists.
Stage Two – Practitioner Review
- A randomly selected panel of judges and attorneys will then anonymously review finalist briefs.
- The panel will select one winner and one runner‑up from the finalists.
Recognition & Publication
- Wisconsin will then post all submitted briefs anonymously in a shared repository accessible to all participating schools.
- That repository will allow the anonymous student briefs to be available to any legal writing faculty to use for teaching, assessment, and professional development purposes.
- A photo of the winning student with their professor will be shared on relevant listservs.
Rules
- Participating schools/faculty must use the assignment "as is" for purposes of writing the competition trial brief.
- The assigning memo, however, can be altered to suit the faculty's particular requirements for the assignment.
- Participating schools/faculty may revise or use the fact pattern from the problem in other ways (e.g., oral argument and/or appellate brief assignment).
- Page limits: No brief shall exceed nine (9) pages or 2500 words in length, including caption and signature block.
- Participating schools/faculty must choose one best brief to represent the entire law school.
- Each participating school shall set the rules for determining how to choose that one brief from their law school.
- Entrants must be enrolled in a legal writing program.
- Second-year students and part-time students are eligible so long as they are enrolled in the school's legal writing program and the brief is submitted as part of the legal writing program.
- Entrants must sign a participation agreement allowing their brief to be available to legal writing faculty to use, anonymously, for educational purposes.
- Should a student choose not to sign the agreement, their brief cannot be the brief submitted to the competition.
- Entrants must agree not to share their written work with any other students in their law school or other law schools until after the school year ends.
- Entrants must agree to not use generative AI to draft any of the text of their brief.
- To the extent allowed by their respective participating school’s AI policy, entrants may use AI for research purposes.
- Entrants must agree to abide by any rules that their legal writing professor/law school has in place about how to draft the brief, due dates, collaboration policies, and other requirements and prohibitions.
- Deadline to submit the school’s entry is June 15, 2027.
Materials
Materials for the competition can be found here, and include:
- 2027 Trial Brief Assignment
- Bench brief for faculty participants
- Suggested internal selection announcement
- Rubric for contest evaluators
Participant Meetings
We will have zoom meetings for all faculty participants to discuss the assignment and student progress. Links to the meetings will be posted below, and recordings of the meetings will be posted below as well.
June 15, 2026, 10:00 a.m. CST
Meeting to discuss the competition, answer any questions about the rules or the concept.
December 14, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. CST
Meeting to discuss the assignment, rubric, answer any questions and address any suggested changes to the assignment materials.
February 19, 2027, at 1:00 p.m. CST
Meeting to discuss student progress, student questions, how professors are addressing substantive questions/issues on the assignment.
April 23, 2027, at 1:00 p.m. CST
Meeting to debrief, suggestions for improving the assignment or the competition, discuss how students did on the assignment, exercises that worked in helping teach concepts related to the assignment.
Finalists
More information coming soon.
Contact
If you have any questions about the competition, or would like further information, contact Kim Peterson, director University of Wisconsin Legal Analysis, Advocacy, and Writing program, at kmpeterson@wisc.edu.
