Overview
Week 6: Legal Office Memorandum
Instructions
In this assignment, please assume that you are a paralegal working for an attorney (Mr. Bore Ring) at a small law firm (Howe, Borem, & Laff) in Little Rock, Arkansas. You have just received an assignment to research, analyze and write a legal memorandum for Mr. Ring concerning a new client's case. Use the following fact pattern as the basis for the legal office memorandum:
The client's name is Ms. Shaunda Lear. Ms. Lear has owned a ranch-style home in Little Rock, Arkansas for five years. About six months ago, she noticed that the master bathroom floor was spongy and sinking. Ms. Lear asked a local flooring contractor to evaluate that floor. That expert determined that there was nothing wrong with the floor but that perhaps a water leak under that floor might be causing it to sink. Afterwards, she contacted a plumber, who confirmed that, yes, there was a water leak under that flooring.
Ms. Lear filed a claim against her homeowner's insurance company, The Insure-all Corporation. (Insure-all provides homeowners coverage nationwide; it is headquartered in Dover, Delaware.) However, Insure-all denied Ms. Lear's claim because it had an engineering report for Ms. Lear's subdivision that indicated that, like all of the other nearby homes, hers had been built on fill dirt. Construction over top of fill dirt is a named exclusion to its policy with Ms. Lear.
Mr. Ring has asked you to prepare a legal office memorandum addressing Ms. Lear's primary issue: how to get Insure-all to pay for the underground plumbing leak and all of the bathroom floor-related damage. Mr. Ring vaguely remembers reading about some case with somewhat similar facts, but at the moment, he cannot remember anything about that case. Because he has to leave now to attend an out-of-town deposition, Mr. Ring has asked you to look for that case. If you find it, then he wants you to analyze it and present it to him in a formal legal office memorandum.
Your legal office memorandum should be written according to the example and be no more than 4 pages long, 12 point font, double-spaced. Submit your legal office memorandum as a Microsoft Word document (.doc or .docx files) so that it can be checked by Turnitin. When you submit your legal office memorandum, include proof that you located your resources by using either Nexis Uni or Fastcase through the APUS Library.
Important Note: Remember that you cannot simply cut and paste from your source. Most of the material should be paraphrased; quotations should make up no more than 10% of the brief. When writing legal office memoranda, all information must be properly cited.