Legal Action Memo to Management

A. LEGAL ACTION MEMO TO BOARD
First, review all of the attachments. Regarding Professor Younger’s memo, it is attached only to be used as a guide. Ignore any suggested limitations on paragraphs and pages.
For this assignment, you are to write a business memo to your management team at Coachella, using the factual info provided in the attachment(s). Consider your memorandum to be one for the liaison between the management team and their outside legal counsel. You are not so amazingly literate in trademark, copyright, and rights of publicity laws (don’t blame your elaw professor) but still much more attuned to the law than a layperson or your direct report. Also, your direct report knows you are taking Entertainment Law now. The subject you must address is whether the plaintiff is likely to prevail or not on causes of action one and two before a federal court based on the alleged facts provided and the law that you will research.
For your memo, you must turn to the Lanham Act, common law (i.e. cases), and any other material using Nexis, Google Scholar, and the Internet. Remember, your authority for your reasoning comes from the law. You should state the issue(s), the applicable rules of law, and incorporate plenty of reasoning, essentially supporting and explaining your result. You may use as authority any appropriate case and statute. By the way, legal analysis is a skill set that is transferable across many careers.
The memo, up to 8 pages, should be double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman, 1″ margins.
Format Instructions of Memo:
The memo must be typed and thoroughly proofread. It cannot be more than 8 pages, double-spaced, written as a Word document in the following format.
• Use Times New Roman, 12-point font
• Use one-inch margins on all sides
• Number your pages starting on the second page
• Include your names(s) in the header on the first page
• Be thorough, concise, and clear
This assignment may be done individually or in groups of up to a maximum of four, and each member must fully participate in your journey of learning law.
More Advice:
The assumption that should generally be held when drafting business memos is that the reader is pressed for time. With this assumption, the following become the ideals of business writing:
Concision
Straightforwardness
Compartmentalization
Simplicity
The goal then is to write efficiently. Concision and straightforwardness keep the piece from being time-consuming. Simplicity and compartmentalization allow for the concepts being presented to be easily parsed and understood.
The former two call for short and uncomplicated sentences. This does not necessarily mean that the writing cannot be sophisticated; it merely asks that the writer keep the economy of words in mind. When examining one’s business writing, a good metric is to ask whether the explanation presented is the quickest way to communicate the comprehensive point.
The latter two are a matter of being organized and keeping subject matters more or less discrete. Granted, concepts under one subject matter will entwine due to mutual relevance, but attempting to write in as compartmentalized a fashion as possible will allow for better flow in presenting information and better reception from the reader who has to connect the dots.
This typically manifests as laying out clearly the direction of the memo. Often, business memos will have a summary and a brief paragraph at the beginning of the memo that outlines exactly the major points and recommendations that will follow.
This will also manifest in exposition and argumentation in that concepts and arguments will be broken down into their component parts and then explained piecemeal. For example, explaining a contract might involve explaining offer, consideration, and acceptance individually. Explaining how a client should handle a breach of contract suit might involve laying out the different potential defenses along with commentary on those defenses’ viability.
Generally, business memos will first present facts and analysis as a large section and then recommendations and outlook based on that analysis. This will vary, of course, based on the purpose of the memo, but it is a good rule of thumb to follow.
Finally, bear in mind the knowledge base of the audience. If the audience already knows the subject matter, then there is no point in wasting time and space on explaining it again in depth. However, if the audience knows nothing at all about the subject matter, then a brief but comprehensive fact pattern should be provided. Assume the audience knows the facts.

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