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Ian Gallacher
ABSTRACT: Musicians practice scales and exercises every day in order to preserve and extend their techniques. This article proposes that lawyers should do much the same thing in order to achieve the same result. The article takes as its starting point the work of Rodolphe Kreutzer, a French violinist from the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries who wrote a series of violin exercises that continue to be used by almost every student today. After a brief introduction to Kreutzer's somewhat surprising immortality, and using the Kreutzer exercises as its model, the article proposes a series of writing exercises, as well as some variants for each exercise, that are designed to help legal writers reflect on, and work to improve, their writing technique. These exercises are non-legal in substance, are designed to take up no more than fifteen minutes of a busy attorney's time, and will hopefully support the adage that practice makes, if not perfect, then better.