Legal Writing
and CommunicationCornell

Certificate Program

The relationship you have with the attorney representing your organization is critical. Your communications and interactions with that attorney will be more productive for everyone if you understand exactly what the attorney wants and needs from you. In this course, you will discover ways to effectively communicate with attorneys, whether they are in house or hired from outside your company. You will consider how there are misconceptions about what attorneys need, such as the notion that everything should be in writing. You will also examine the duties associated with being a corporate representative and what your role entails when you are called to testify on behalf of your company.

Additionally, you'll explore the professional rules attorneys must comply with to ensure proper communication with the client. You'll be able to distill best practices to follow at the beginning of the attorney-client relationship that will ensure better communication throughout the relationship. Finally, you'll have the opportunity to apply this knowledge in certain situations, such as when an employee is asked to represent the company at a deposition. Ultimately, you'll have a more sophisticated appreciation of and approach to communicating and working with attorneys.

The lifespan of documents can be longer than expected when they were originally created and can cause unforeseen problems for companies involved in a lawsuit. In this course, you will examine the role documents play in litigation and how they can both help and hurt the effectiveness of the attorney working on behalf of your company. You will explore the various stages of a lawsuit and how documents are used in each stage. You will consider lessons learned as you evaluate the types of documents that have negatively impacted companies involved in a lawsuit and discover best practices to minimize the risk associated with creating documents.

Should you hit “send”? Because email is an integral part of business today, you will identify considerations to keep in mind before drafting or sending an electronic communication. The skills you develop will help you decide if you should even create an email. Ultimately, you'll understand the legal impact of documents that company employees create, be able to identify problematic documents, and make wise decisions about any document that you create in the workplace.

Attorneys rely on company documents to provide the information necessary to win a lawsuit. In this course, you will discover how to compose documents that help — rather than hinder — lawyers. You will begin by exploring ways to accurately capture information from witness interviews. This includes the report of an interview conducted in connection with an incident occurring in the workplace.

As you begin to understand why these interview reports are so critical, you will examine how to assess and document your interviews in a way that does not put your company at risk. Do you have an unconscious bias that might impact the quality of the information you collect and the actual report itself? You will have an opportunity to take a self-test to find out. By the end of this course, you will develop or refine your skills in composing company documents to be able to confidently produce work product that the company's attorney will appreciate and value.

In law, as in many aspects of life, the ability to persuade is a key skill to success. In this course, you will discover that this is a skill you can develop. You will explore the universal and foundational principles of persuasion, principles used in law, in business, and in other areas.

You will examine how attorneys use persuasion in written documents to win a lawsuit involving a company they represent. You will also apply a formula designed to gauge the accuracy of the conclusion an attorney will ultimately attempt to prove is right. By the end of this course, you'll be able to identify the three modes of persuasion and recognize when they're being used in a legal argument, in business, and in other contexts.