Best of the Best: How to Submit Your Law School's Winning Brief for a Scribes Brief-Writing Award

Did your school win a best-brief award last year?

Here's a reminder that Scribes--The American Society of Legal Writers--is now accepting submissions for the 2022 Brief-Writing Award. The deadline for submitting briefs is October 3, 2022.

Scribes launched its Brief-Writing Award in 1996 to recognize and celebrate excellent student-written briefs. Scribes believes that legal writing is of paramount importance to law students and their careers, and it hopes to encourage good legal writing by recognizing its finest examples.

The Scribes Brief-Writing Award for 2022 considers submissions of moot-court briefs that have won first place in a national or regional moot-court competition during the 2021-22 academic year (August 2021 to June 2022). The award committee then selects the best briefs from all of the winning briefs submitted.

Scribes has opened nominations for its 2022 Brief-Writing Award and will accept nominations until October 3, 2022. The award committee will consider briefs from the 2021-2022 academic year. The award winners will be announced early next year. 

Instructions for submitting a brief for the Scribes competition:

1.      By October 3, 2022, email an electronic copy of the winning brief to scribes[email protected].  

2.     The subject line of the email should indicate that it’s a Scribes brief nomination from “___ Law School" (the students’ law school, not a sponsoring law school).

3.     The body of the e-mail must include the following information:

• Name of the competition
• Place where the brief was named best brief (e.g., “finals,” “SW regional”)
• Names of the students who wrote the brief
• Students’ school
• Name of the students’ coach or advisor, if any

4.     The brief itself cannot include any information that identifies the student authors or their school. Please check the cover page, signature pages, and headers or footers.

5.     Submit the brief as a PDF file if possible, although we will accept Word format if necessary.

6.     The brief should be submitted as a single file.

Please contact Scribes Executive Director Philip Johnson at [email protected] if you have any questions about submitting a brief for the competition.

Mark E. Wojcik, Immediate Past President, Scribes--The American Society of Legal Writers