Evan Schaeffer at The Illinois Trial Practice Weblog offers some good advice on how to start a memorandum or brief:
At the trial court level, most lawyers begin their briefs with an “Introduction” section. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it leads to the mistaken notion that you should actually put an introduction in the introduction. You shouldn’t.
And that’s just the “introduction.” Ba-dum-bump. Read the whole thing.
I got this link from this post at Legal Writing Prof Blog, which has more.