Sue A. Payne
Clinical Assistant Professor of Law
Phone: (312) 503-0705
E-mail: s-payne@law.northwestern.edu
Sue Payne, a Northwestern Law alumna, joined the Communication and Legal Reasoning faculty in the fall of 2005 as a Clinical Assistant Professor. She is teaching Basics of Contract Drafting to second and third year law students and LLM and LLM-K candidates. She also teaches a contract drafting module to all of Northwestern’s first-year law students. Her book, Basic Contract Drafting: A Narrative Approach, is forthcoming from Aspen in 2010.
From 1985 to 1999, Sue worked at the Chicago firm of Butler, Rubin, Saltarelli & Boyd, where she became a partner in 1991. Her practice focused on employment counseling and litigation. From 1999 through the spring of 2005, she served as Vice President and Corporate Counsel of Information Resources, Inc. ("IRI"), a market research company. At IRI, in addition to functioning as employment counsel, Sue was responsible for drafting and negotiating a wide variety of contracts.
In 2004, Sue worked part-time as a Writing Resource Advisor at John Marshall Law School. She tutored first-year students and LLM candidates and taught a workshop on persuasive writing. Additionally, Sue has served as Director of the Diagnostic Writing Workshop for first-year law students at Loyola University School of Law.
Sue is also a published poet. Her work has appeared in the New York Quarterly and Spoon River Poetry Review, among other publications. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Robert Frost Place, a center for poetry and the arts, located in Franconia, New Hampshire.
Areas of Expertise
- Legal Writing
- Legal Research
Courses
Selected Publications
- Basic Contract Drafting Assignments: A Narrative Approach (Wolters Kluwer, 2010).
- Teaching Contract Drafting to First-Year Law Students in Three Hours or Less in 18 perspectives: teaching legal research and writing 145-150 (2010).
Education
- BA, Denison University
- MA, Ohio State University
- JD, Northwestern University
Prior Appointments
- Partner, Butler, Rubin, Saltarelli & Boyd
- Vice President and Corporate Counsel, Information Resources, Inc.
