Legal practitioners engage in legal drafting on a daily basis and effective written communication skills are essential for legal practice. This unit aims to enhance your legal drafting skills by providing you with an authentic practical learning experience. You will complete a variety of practical drafting tasks that newly qualified lawyers are likely to undertake in practice, including: - drafting legal documents, such as pleadings and affidavits; - drafting contracts in accordance with a client’s instructions; - preparing letters of advice; and - preparing persuasive arguments, such as outlines of argument. This unit will analyse a range of drafting techniques and explore how to convey complex information using clear and simple language. You will also consider how to draft a document in accordance with its purpose, the needs of the audience and the client’s instructions. You will further refine their drafting skills by engaging in reflective practice and through a process of critically analysing and redrafting existing documents. Topics of focus include: - drafting techniques and plain English drafting; - grammar, syntax and punctuation in legal drafting; - the art of persuasive writing; - common sources of ambiguity in the drafting of documents; and - devising solutions to drafting issues. Note that a comprehensive coverage of drafting convention relevant to specialised substantive areas of the law is not possible in this unit. Instead, the unit focuses on the foundational principles for drafting legal documents to prepare students for the significant and diverse range of tasks they may face as a legal practitioner.
Level | Undergraduate |
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Unit Level | 2 |
Credit Points | 6 |
Student Contribution Band | SCA Band 4 |
Fraction of Full-Time Student Load | 0.125 |
Pre-requisites or Co-requisites |
Pre-requisite: 24 credit points of law. Important note: Students enrolled in a subsequent unit who failed their pre-requisite unit, should drop the subsequent unit before the census date or within 10 working days of Fail grade notification. Students who do not drop the unit in this timeframe cannot later drop the unit without academic and financial liability. See details in the Assessment Policy and Procedure (Higher Education Coursework). |
Class Timetable | View Unit Timetable |
Residential School | No Residential School |
All on-campus students are expected to attend scheduled classes – in some units, these classes are identified as a mandatory (pass/fail) component and attendance is compulsory. International students, on a student visa, must maintain a full time study load and meet both attendance and academic progress requirements in each study period (satisfactory attendance for International students is defined as maintaining at least an 80% attendance record).
Each 6-credit Undergraduate unit at CQUniversity requires an overall time commitment of an average of 12.5 hours of study per week, making a total of 150 hours for the unit.
Assessment Task | Weighting |
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1. Online Quiz(zes) | 20% |
2. Reflective Practice Assignment | 20% |
3. Written Assessment | 60% |
This is a graded unit: your overall grade will be calculated from the marks or grades for each assessment task, based on the relative weightings shown in the table above. You must obtain an overall mark for the unit of at least 50%, or an overall grade of ‘pass’ in order to pass the unit. If any ‘pass/fail’ tasks are shown in the table above they must also be completed successfully (‘pass’ grade). You must also meet any minimum mark requirements specified for a particular assessment task, as detailed in the ‘assessment task’ section (note that in some instances, the minimum mark for a task may be greater than 50%).
All University policies are available on the Policy web site, however you may wish to directly view the following policies below.
This list is not an exhaustive list of all University policies. The full list of policies are available on the Policy web site .
Term 2 - 2023 : The overall satisfaction for students in the last offering of this course was 94.12% (`Agree` and `Strongly Agree` responses), based on a 26.98% response rate.
Every unit is reviewed for enhancement each year. At the most recent review, the following staff and student feedback items were identified and recommendations were made.
On successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
Assessment Tasks | Learning Outcomes | ||||
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1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
1 - Online Quiz(zes) | • | ||||
2 - Reflective Practice Assignment | • | • | • | • | |
3 - Written Assessment | • | • | • | • | • |
Graduate Attributes | Learning Outcomes | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
1 - Communication | • | • | • | • | • |
2 - Problem Solving | • | • | • | ||
3 - Critical Thinking | • | ||||
4 - Information Literacy | • | • | • | • | • |
Assessment Tasks | Graduate Attributes | |||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | |
1 - Online Quiz(zes) | • | • | ||||||||
2 - Reflective Practice Assignment | • | • | • | |||||||
3 - Written Assessment | • | • | • |