The case
Henry is an employee of Virtual Company. He has worked in this company for 2 years. The company gave him an Employee’s Handbook. The handbook has a chapter about discipline. In that chapter, it says that browsing social media on smartphone during working time is viewed as stealing time from the company and the time will be deducted from employee’s paycheck for the first three violations. Harder disciplinary action will be taken after that. Henry put the handbook on his shelf and never read it again. One day, his manager passed by his working cubicle and found that he was reading news on Twitter on his phone. The manager knocked at the wall of the cubicle and left. The next day, he was found watching something on his phone again and the manager knock on his cubicle again. Henry found that he was paid less. The manager explained that this is because he violated the rule of no social media. Henry is going to go against the company.
Task
Please write a memo on this issue to your boss. She needs your information to make a decision about what to do next. You need to follow the format of the business memo. Information on how to write business memos and sample business memos are posted in this module. You need to follow the IRAC rule of legal writing for the part of the legal issue. For those who did not take my BLAW 280, the instructions about the IRAC writing come next page.
Related rule
Legal writing instructions
Standard legal writing consists of 4 sections, the issue, the rule, the analysis, and the conclusion (IRAC). Typically, this structure of legal writing is for law school training purposes, applying mainly to case law summaries. In fact, it can be expanded to more general legal writings, including non-professional writing regarding the legal issue in business. Here is the introduction to the IRAC writing.
Basic IRAC
Issue: State the legal issue(s) to be discussed.
Rule: State the relevant statutes and case law.
Analysis/application: Apply the relevant rules to the facts that created the issue.
Conclusion: State the most likely conclusions using the logic of the application section. Don’t forget to include any alternative outcomes created by ambiguities in the relevant facts and rules.
For example, your company is an international trading company. You are in charge of sales. You accepted an order from your customer to deliver the good by a given date. However, due to some reasons, the factory could not make the product ready for delivery by the given date. Your customer was willing to wait. He asked for double damages for the loss due to the delayed delivery. You do not think this is a reasonable claim. However, the customer may cancel the order and terminate the contract if you deny his request. You want to submit a report to your boss about this issue with an analysis of the legal risk. You can apply the IRAC method to the legal issue part of the report.
An instruction on the IRAC writing for law schoolstudents is available online at https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/IRAC%20ANALYSIS_Saunders.pdf. Please read it carefully. You may make your writing professional if you study it well and do more writing exercises.
Note: to access to the online instruction provided above, you need to hold the Control button and then use your mouse to click the link. For a weird reason, the copy-and-paste method does not work.
