Many of you will be familiar with the following scenario. At the start of the semester, you give your students a syllabus that lays out important dates for the course, including the deadlines for writing assignments. Your students glance at the deadlines and immediately start to plan backward. If, for example, the closed memo is due on October15 at 5 p.m., your students (with a few rare exceptions) will instinctively start to ask themselves how much time they need to write the memo, get it to you by 4:59 p.m. on October 15, and get a good grade. This thought process will then give rise to a new, interim date in each student’s mind: the date upon which the student must start work on the memo. Of course, some students will do a better job than others in coming up with a reasonable estimate (and sticking to it). This scenario, which I call “Just-in-Time Writing, ”frustrates legal writing professors for a number of reasons.