“The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated”: Reading and Writing Objective Legal Memoranda in a Mobile Computing Age

Abstract

Seventy years ago, carefully written objective legal memos — internal memoranda written by one lawyer to another for the purpose of communicating law and legal analysis and meant to serve as the basis for legal advice — were viewed as a critical part of practice. In today’s legal practice culture of on-screen reading and writing, lawyers complain memos are expensive, time consuming, and perhaps even ill-suited for reading on screens and mobile devices.