LAWE 601

Catalog description

Most civil litigators spend the majority of their time on pretrial matters rather than in the courtroom. As a new lawyer, many of the critical pretrial litigation tasks will be assigned to you by your supervising attorney and this can be an intimidating experience if you are unequipped for such projects. This course will enhance your understanding of critical pretrial tools and provide you with practical experience using these tools so that you have some framework for approaching them in practice. To that end, this course will require you to draft a variety of litigation documents that are frequently used in federal litigation. You will also be exposed to the deposition process and given an opportunity to depose a witness. Thus, the course will strengthen a variety of fundamental litigation skills which are the “bread and butter” work of new attorneys. The course will primarily focus on the correct use of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and federal court practice, but the skills that you learn will be relevant and largely transferable to state court litigation as well. This course will satisfy the Law Skills IV requirement.