Welcome to Lawyering Skills III! One step further than your first year Lawyering Skills (LS) class, you will be taking what you've learned and translating that into a beautiful and shiny appellate brief by the end of the semester. You'll perform research (yay!), craft arguments, and write and edit until you can't see straight.
And then you need to turn in a polished product to your professor, no big deal. While your LS professor will be guiding you through the ins and outs of your arguments, and your friendly law librarians will be giving you tips and tricks on how to perform your legal research, the formatting of your brief itself is often not given much thought until it's the day before and now you can't figure out why the page numbers are off, or how to insert a table of Authorities without manually typing the entire thing.
This guide is here to melt that formatting stress away, leaving you feeling confident that you're just a few clicks away from a professional appellate brief.* In this guide we will walk you through the steps of formatting your brief including: setting headings and styles, page numbering, creating a Table of Contents, and inserting a Table of Authorities.
And as always, the Law Librarians are here for you. After looking through this guide, if you still have questions you are always only a visit, email, or chat away from help.
*Note: The tips and tricks in this guide are based on Microsoft Word for a PC with some Mac formatting included where appropriate. There are many versions of Word, but these instructions should work for most of them, with possible small aesthetic differences. For the most part, these should be a good basis, and with a little common sense, you'll be just fine!