Law School 2.0

ETL Conference 2012

The first Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Conference took place on September 26-28, and what an amazing conference it was. 

Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers (ETL) is an initiative of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), which is part of the University of Denver. Although not directly a part of the law school, it is now housed in a beautiful building on the doorstep of the law school on the main campus of the University. Its Executive Director is Rebecca Love Kourlis, former Colorado Supreme Court Justice and this year's winner of the ABA's John Marshall Award.

The Director of the ETL Initiative is Bill Sullivan, the primary author of Educating Lawyers (Carnegie Foundation, 2007), known in legal education as "the Carnegie Report."  The Manager of ETL is Marnee Baker. ETL also hosts and manages a website, which includes teaching portfolios offered by ETL Fellows that show how they teach in this way.

ETL is based on a consortium model. That is, other than the infrastructure (managers, website, etc.) which is housed at IAALS, it is made up of now 24 law schools that are all practicing to some degree, and are committed to, the "Carnegie" model for legal education.  These law schools applied to join ETL, and one of the benefits of membership is an annual conference bringing together teams of law professors from each consortium school. This conference, entitled "The Development of Professional Identity in Legal Education: Rethinking Learning and Assessment," was the first.

As the title of the conference suggests, this one focused on the "Third Apprenticeship" (a reference to the Carnegie model) of Formation of Professional Identity. The full conference program can be found here.

The conference began with a "speed networking" session, in which each school was able to meet (for a short 15 minute segment) representatives from all the other attending consortium schools. That was followed by a dinner, where Jim Moliterno (Washington & Lee) was given the "Rebuilding Justice" award by IAALS in recognition of his many contributions to legal education reform over the years.

The next morning, Bill Sullivan and I co-presented an "Interactive Pedagogical Presentation on Professional Identity Formation." Advance reading for that session was a short article squib I wrote that was derived from two blog posts previously published here, as well as a handout for an exercise that I conducted during the talk. Both items - together with all handouts from the conference - can be found here.

Our talk was followed by a presentation by Bill Henderson, who is a professor at Indiana University Law School and who blogs at The Legal Whiteboard. Bill opened our eyes to the compelling data showing the changing dynamics (and economics) of the legal profession. After lunch, we heard more data from the assessment of formation of professional identity work being done by Neil Hamilton, Jerry Organ, and Verna Monson at the Holloran Center at St. Thomas University Law School.

The afternoon concluded with two concurrent sessions, one of which featured Bill Henderson and Jim Moliterno talking about their respective programs, and the other of which featured my colleague Roberto Corrada and me talking about the whole-course simulations that we use in our teaching. Roberto is justifiably famous for teaching both Labor Law and Administrative Law through a whole-course simulation model, and he did a great job explaining the educational theory behind simulations and describing how his two courses operate.  I spoke about the Discovery Practicum course that I have taught at Denver Law for nearly 20 years.  I have a post here on this blog describing the course, and Course Portfolio on the ETL site.

On Saturday morning, we heard two tremendous speakers address the question of formation of Professional Identity. First, Dr. Matthew Wynia from the American Medical Association spoke about the development of professionalism in medical training, in which he shared some of the history - back before Hippocrates - of professional identity formation in medicine, and also shared a "top ten" list of things that are done in medical education to inculcate professionalism. The list he offered was ranked from "Easy to do/But Ineffective" to "Hard to do/But very Effective." I found it compelling that simulations are right in the middle - hard to do but not too hard, and pretty darn effective.  After Dr. Wynia, Daisy Hurst Floyd, former Dean of the Mercer Law School, spoke about Cultivating Self-Reflection and Lawyer Integrity. In her talk she described a course she teaches which involves students learning from practicing attorneys, and which also involves student reflective journaling, a technique I use in the Discovery course, but about which I have become even more intensely interested since she spoke. 

Near the end of the conference, we had a Dean's panel discussion, featuring Deans from Loyola (New Orleans), Denver, Dayton, and Southwestern. The title of the panel was "Implementing Institutional Change," and each Dean spoke about what they are doing to support "Carnegie Style" teaching at their school. Each of the Deans explained the various forms of support they have given in their schools, such as offering stipends for new and innovative course development. Dean Paul McGreal (Dayton) spoke about the initiatives he has developed and supported at his school that are moving towards the "flipped" classroom model, and mentioned (while I blushed) that he was "transformed" to teach in this way - and support this kind of teaching in his Deanship - from reading the Law School 2.0 book.

Next year's ETL Conference will be October 3 -5, 2013 at Denver Law, where we will connect the formation of professional identity with the bench and bar. For another account of this year's ETL Conference, visit Mary Lynch's excellent post at the Best Practices in Legal Education blog at Albany Law School.  

ETL Conference: Development of Professional Identity

Final preparations are underway for the first annual conference of the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers consortium of law schools committed to reform in legal education. The conference, entitled The Development of Professional Identity in Legal Education: Rethinking Learning and Assessment, will be hosted by the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law on September 27 to 29.  

The Conference Committee is Bill Sullivan (principle author of the Carnegie Report), Steve Daniels (ABF), Marnee Baker (ETL Program Manager), Roberto Corrada (Denver) and myself. It seems we have been in innumerable meetings over the last year, trying to think of every detail ahead of time. This will be a different sort of conference that will feature the consortium teams getting to know each other and sharing information, discussion groups after many of the presentations, and a different form of conference assessment: a random focus group at the end.

During the conference, Roberto Corrada and I will be offering a presentation about teaching with simulations, and there will be other presentations featuring Bill Henderson (Indiana), Neil Hamilton (St. Thomas), and Jim Moliterno (Washington & Lee).  Nearly all the ETL Fellows will be in attendance, and nearly all of the 25 consortium schools will be represented. It should be a great conference.

Follow up to LWI Conference Presentation

Last week I gave a talk at the 2012 Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) about “Carnegie Integrated” courses, and the opportunity that they present for LRW faculty in the coming years.  A Carnegie integrated courses is one that is intentionally designed to integrate the three "apprenticeships" defined in the Carnegie Report: Doctrine, Skills, and development of Professional Identity.  The blog post I prepared in advance of my talk can be found here.

As my talk was beginning, I asked the attendees to fill out an index card with the answers to three questions: 1) I teach a course other than LRW; 2) The course I teach is primarily writing-focused; and 3) The course I teach is primarily doctrine-focused, with a substantial writing component.  At the end of my talk I gave the compiled results, but I thought I would detail the results again here for clarity and future reference.

There were 50 attendees at the session (not bad for Friday!) but I received 44 cards back.  The answer to Question 1 - "I teach a course other than LRW" - was 30 Yes and 14 No.  The answer to Question 2 - "The other course I teach is primarily writing-focused" - was 22 Yes, 12 No, and 10 N/A.  So, most of the attendees who teach an upper-level course teach a traditional writing course, such as Contract Drafting, or Appellate Brief writing.  

The answer to Question 3 was the most interesting: "The course I teach is primarily doctrine-focused, with a substantial writing component," 9 Yes, 24 No, and 11 N/A.  So, very few attendees teach a doctrine-focused skills and writing course - what I (and others) have been calling a "Carnegie Integrated" course.  But since those courses are best taught through a mix of traditional doctrine and a course design that incorporates "whole-course simulation," I think that LRW Faculty are very well positioned to teach such courses in the future, since that is a form of pedagogy in which we are expert.

Anyway, that's some more detail about the quick poll from the audience during my talk in Desert Springs.  Let me know your thoughts in the comments - about the poll, or the idea of teaching such courses.

 

LWI 2012 Conference Presentation

For many years, legal education has been criticized for not teaching its students enough of the practical skills they need to function effectively as lawyers.  Those of us who teach legal writing have always understood this.  Most of us teach in the first year, although some of us also teach upper level writing courses as well.  Writing, of course, is certainly is an important skill for lawyers.  But what is also needed is innovation in the teaching of doctrine, and because many (if not most) LRW faculty practiced law before becoming teachers, we are well positioned to teach doctrine in a practice-focused way.

While some of this sort of teaching can be accomplished in clinics, much more can be provided by simply making many of the courses we already have more integrated, with better formative assessment, and based more on a design of teaching “doctrine-in-context.”  Legal writing teachers are well positioned to develop, propose, and teach such courses, and it could present a tremendous opportunity for us.  My presentation at the LWI Biennial Conference this year will detail my Discovery Practice course, and the development of a “Carnegie Integrated Course" requirement at the University of Denver.

While more resources will – at many schools – be put into clinics, there is more that can be done in a non-live client environment to improve writing skills and prepare students for practice.  One of the things that can be done is to offer more simulation-based practice courses with a doctrinal focus that include a significant writing component.  Those of us who teach legal writing are, in many cases, the best-positioned members of our faculties to teach such courses, and indeed, a few of us already do. But it is still not widespread. 

True, many schools have upper level writing courses, but this effort includes, but (in many cases) could go beyond those courses.  These new courses are ones that combine a significant doctrinal component with formative assessment of numerous writing projects, taught in a fully simulated practice environment.  This presentation at the 15th Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) will focus on how to teach such a course, and how to advocate for such courses in your law school.  Further, it will describe the creation of a course requirements list for what we at the University of Denver law school are calling “Carnegie Integrated Courses” (CIC), and describe the current state of this project. Here is the Prezi I will be using during my talk:

 

If you prefer to view it at the Prezi site, here is a link to the Prezi for my talk, which is scheduled for Friday, June 1 at 10:00 a.m. during the Conference in Desert Springs, California. If you would like more information about the Discovery Practice course that I teach (which is an example of the CIC model), you can find a blog post about it here, and an article written about it by one of my former students here.  Also, a complete teaching portfolio for the course is available on the Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers site, which you can find here.

For many of us, a career teaching just legal writing might feel limiting in the long term, but adding such a course to your portfolio and getting it accepted into the curriculum could present a terrific opportunity for professional development.  A long-term mix of teaching some first year legal writing, and some upper-level writing courses with a significant simulation and practice focus, might well be the direction that many schools will be moving over the next several years as they adjust their curricula to respond to the Carnegie report.  Accordingly, this could be both a broadening of focus and a tremendous opportunity for the legal writing community, and many of us will want to be well positioned to take advantage of it.

 

New Video for Law School 2.0

In the last of three videos that I prepared about my work - with the help of Lexis - I talk about my book Law School 2.0: Legal Education for a Digital Age (LexisNexis/Mattew Bender 2009).  In the book I explain what I call the cost/change connundrum in legal education: we know what we need to do (smaller classes, more skills training) but most of it involves lower faculty-student ratios and more individualized feedback. And that costs more money, at a time when legal education is already under fire for being expensive.  The thesis of the book - and many of the posts on this blog by the same name - is that the only way we can break through the cost/change connundrum in legal education is to be creative in the use of technology.  In the video, I make the same argument, and I also introduce the idea of making a large class "smaller" by putting 2/3rds of the material online and having smaller classes actually meet once per week.  I explain this idea in greater detail in yesterday's post A Response: The Issue of Skills Course Supply and Demand.

 

 

New Video for the Skills & Values Series

At the AALS conference a few months ago, LexisNexis also asked me to answer some questions relating generally to the Skills & Values Series of law school textbooks, of which I am one of two Series editors.  In this video, I explain the reasons behind the design of the Series.  I also explain what the term "Carnegie Integrated Course" means, and how the S&V Series provides support to teachers who want to teach in this way:

 

 

Law Students Come Together at Law Schooled

A new blog has come online that publishes and disseminates information about legal education reform for law students. This is an important development, because students need to be informed about the discussion so they can make good choices about which law school to attend, and how to get the education they need at the law school they attend. 

I think law students have not yet had much of a voice in this discussion for two reasons: first, they are focused on the experience for only three years, and in the first year (and even after) it is hard to think about anything else; and second, because we (legal educators) have not encouraged them to speak up enough or given them enough options.  When law students become informed about these questions, and vote with their dollars (in selecting a law school) and with their feet (in selecting upper level courses to take) the legal academy will have to take notice. After all, without students, there isn't much reason for us to be here.

But it is critical that their effort not be a flash in the pan. I hope Law Schooled will have a succession plan in place, so that as students graduate and move into their careers, the discussion can be sustained.  In the meantime, it is good to see students joining in the discussion in an informed way.  Welcome! (Hat tip to Scott Fruehwald's post on this).

CELT Conference Presentation

Tonight I am giving a talk at a conference sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Law Teaching (CELT) at Albany Law School.  The conference, which has attracted over 100 attendees (mostly clinical and doctrinal professors), is entitled Setting and Assessing Learning Objectives from Day One.  The full program for the conference can be found here.  It looks to be a terrific conference that will advance the discussion about outcomes-driven assessment and curricular design in legal education.

In many ways, this conference is the continuation of the Legal Education at the Crossroads: Assessment Conference that I hosted at the University of Denver in September of 2009.  Much has happened in this area since that conference, and it is a good time for those who are moving the discussion forward to gather again to learn from each others’ experiences and developing knowledge.

My talk tonight, which starts off the conference, is entitled Update on Outcomes Reform in Legal Education.  I have decided that I need to provide some background before I get to updates – I am concerned that some of the attendees might feel like they are coming into the middle of a conversation, so a little background is warranted.  Of course Mary Lynch, the conference organizer and Director of CELT, has given me an impossible task.  Providing a precise update on a topic that is expanding like kudzu throughout legal education is almost impossible.

But here is a link to the Prezi that will go with my talk.  I have used the age-old journalist’s model of the Five “Ws” and one “H” to structure my remarks.  And I have intentionally used the metaphor of the background picture – we are climbing a mountain, and assessment can be the red guide rope that we have needed for many years.  

 

 

During my talk, I will cite several reference points.  Of course, the latest draft of the Accreditation Standards on outcomes are important, and we will look at that.  Here is a link to the current draft. On the subject of objections to outcomes assessment, everyone should read Mary Lynch’s article (forthcoming in the William Mitchell Law Review) The Top Ten Myths Concerning Student Learning Outcomes in Legal Education. In her article, Mary describes and addresses 10 common objections that most of us involved in outcomes assessment have heard from some of our colleagues.

I will also reference Bloom’s taxonomy, and how helpful it (and several of its offspring) can be when trying to articulate learning outcomes. Here is a link to the graphic version of the taxonomy that I used in my talk, which also includes several other versions of the Bloom “wheel.” I make reference to the Shultz/Zedick Lawyering Effectiveness factors, and you can find a list of those, and an article describing them, here.  And I will speak a bit about my concern that there exists some confusion between the terms Professionalism and Professional Identity; they are not the same, and I think understanding PI as a separate learning outcome is a critical step in achieving the goals of the Carnegie report, as will being able to assess how well (and in what direction) we are advancing the development of professional identity in our students.  I have a blog post about the confusion issue here, where I try to explain my view of the separation between the two concepts.

 

David Segal: The Business of Law Schools is "Crazy"

Recently, Bloomberg Law posted a video interview with New York Times reporter David Segal on YouTube.  Mr. Segal is the reporter who has written several articles over the last year highly critical of legal education generally, and law school economics in particular.  If you would like to read those articles, you may find them here, here, here, and here. 

In the video interview, Mr. Segal explains how he came to be interested in the subject of legal education, alleges that the "business of law school is crazy," and refers to the "madness" of the overly influential and "pathological" U.S. News rankings. He calls the "prestige race" sparked by U.S. News "incredibly destructive."

Concerning the tension between rising student debt and the history of some law schools to not reveal accurate employment information, Mr. Segal argues in favor of law schools "patronizing" potential students to provide that information and let them know how tough it is to make a living as a lawyer. He also argues in favor of a range of law schools producing different "levels" of lawyers, from those qualified to handle small matters to those qualified to handle bigger ones, suggesting that this would benefit consumers. He charges that the ABA has a conflict of interest in being the regulating body for legal education, since lawyers have an interest in their being fewer lawyers on the market, and want to keep wages high.  Near the end of the interview, Mr. Segal strikes a discouraging note when he predicts that the extent of reform that the ABA or Congress is likely to force will be limited to better reporting of employment data and similar information.

Here is the video (14 minutes):

 

From my point of view, in his articles in the Times and in this video, Mr. Segal has put a spotlight on problems in legal education at the top (schools that mostly disfavor teaching lawyering skills) and at the bottom (schools that charge a lot and may be playing fast and loose with employment data). But he misses the good middle almost entirely.  

There are many law schools today that are working hard (and harder every day) to train their graduates better for a wider range of law practice. One way of looking at the concern about a lack of "small matter" lawyers is that too many law schools are not producing graduates who are ready to practice when they leave, some of whom might "hang out a shingle" competently, and develop a small matter practice and make a decent living doing so (and be able to pay off their educational debt). 

I suppose the sexier, headline grabbing, front page "above the fold" articles are the ones Mr. Segal wants to write. But there is another very encouraging story that he is missing, and by not paying attention to it, he is not providing the full picture of legal education today. There are many encouraging signs. For a start, he might want to look at the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers initiative of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. A consortium of law schools - across the spectrum - are working hard to improve legal education. My own course portfolio - for the Discovery Practicum course - was one of the first ones posted, but I am hardly alone; more and more law professors are changing how they teach law, in part by making it more practice focused.

These efforts are about producing better value for the cost of legal education. We may not be able to reduce the cost, but we can teach better, and prepare our students for a variety of practice settings. As I argue in the Law School 2.0 book, leveraging technology will play an increasingly important role in providing better value for the cost. This was also the subject of my talk at New York Law School as part of the Future Ed 3 Conference last April.

Personally, Mr. Segal's attack on law schools for not teaching practical skills was the toughest for me to take. He may be right, at least at the highest ranked schools, and the rest of us are not paragons of virtue on this either.  We could all do more. But to suggest that law schools do not teach real lawyering skills was hard to swallow. I have taught a course doing just that for over 20 years, and have written extensively about how to do this. After teaching as an adjunct for many years, I left a healthy 20 year practice to teach full time at the University of Denver so I could do more of this kind of teaching. A former student in the Discovery course wrote an article in the February issue of the Denver Bar Asssociation's montly publication about how it helped her to be ready for practice. A more eloquent rebuke to Mr. Segal's article could not be imagined - at least not by me.

Yes, that is just one course. But there are many like it. And even more broadly, the University of Denver has required a course of all first year students called Lawyering Process, and I have taught in that program for 15 years (as an adjunct for six years, and full-time faculty for 9). I have been Director of that program for the last 4 years.  My colleagues (9 full-time faculty members) believe very strongly in what we do - teaching lawyering skills to first year students - and many of us have dedicated our careers to doing this. And we are not alone! Lawyering skills teachers abound in nearly every law school across the country. Are there issues about how we are perceived and valued in the academy? Sure. But we teach these skills day in, day out. Hundreds of us. The complete picture is much better, and more encouraging, than Mr. Segal acknowledges, and that story would benefit from his spotlight. There's something to write about.

The Practicality of Practicums

The February issue of The Docket, a montly publication of the Colorado Bar Association, includes an article by a former student, Beth A. Tomerlin.  The article, The Practicality of Practicums: Thinking and Acting Like a Lawyer, One Class at a Time, describes the Discovery Practicum course that I have taught at DU Law School for nearly 20 years.  Beth was a student of mine in Lawyering Process in her first year, and took the Discovery course in her second year.  She graduated from the law school in 2007.

Needless to say, it is gratifying to read what a student has written after taking one of your courses, particularly when it is written from the perspective of having been out in practice for several years.  But this is especially true when it makes such a convicing case about how the course helped her be prepared for practice.  For any teacher, seeing a student succeed with what you taught them is immensely gratifying. For a teacher like me who has given so many years to this sort of teaching - well, it doesn't get better.

Although I have to say, it takes some getting used to. I first taught this course almost 20 years ago at DU, as an adjunct professor. I felt like I was about as alone as alone could be. I thought it was working, and my students seemed to think so too (for the most part).  I tweaked the course over the years, and when I joined the full-time faculty in 2003 I revived the course in the curriculum, and have taught it once or twice a year since then.

It is not like this is rocket science or anything. It can be done with virtually any law school course. It is based on the simple proposition of "Learn and Do."  Learn the rules and the cases - the applicable doctrine - and then practice it in between classes.  In my experience, this is best accomplished when the course is designed as what I call a "whole course simulation," organized around a rich problem set.

It is this kind of course that really needs new teaching materials, since a traditional casebook just won't work.  That is why I have been serving as Series Editor on the Skills & Values Series with Lexis for the last several years, and why I authored the S&V book for Discovery.  Although you could use it in several different ways, it is designed to support this kind of whole course simulation (as are the other S&V texts).

In the Discovery course, students read the rule, applicable cases, and some information about strategy and context before class (some of which is in that print book shown above, and some of which is in the Webcourse for the book online), then we review and discuss that material in class, and then the students engage in a mock litigation and *use* the discovery tools and strategies we have learned about in class.  Each week, they prepare a discovery document and serve it on their opposing counsel. The next week we learn about the next discovery rule, and then we practice that one.  I give them feedback on each assignment. Later in the semester they take, defend, and act as a witness in a deposition (with student court reporters taking down the transcript).  And at the end of the course they settle the case in settlement negotiations, and the final paper is their settlement agreement.

There are many advantages of teaching in this way. For starters, it's more fun.  For the teacher as well as the students. As a result, both are more engaged, and engaged learners are learning more. Students love this approach (you may read some of my student evaluations at the link below). Imagine such a course with a professor lecturing about the rules and strategy during class, with students taking a final exam for 100% of the grade.  Well, I suppose students could learn the rules and cases in the traditional class (although I don't think they would learn more substance than what my students learn anyway), but the retention rate would be awful. And they would never actually learn how to draft the discovery documents they will soon be asked to draft in practice.

But don't believe me! Read Beth's article - it's all in there.

When I read the Carnegie Report in 2007 I was gratified to see it argue in favor of more law school courses in which Doctrine, Skills, and Professional Identity are integrated. Because that perfectly describes the goal of the course design for the Discovery Practicum. Students learn the doctrine - be assured of that. But they also begin to develop their skills of using the doctrine (and hone their legal writing skills too - always a good thing). Perhaps most importantly, the simulation creates situations in which the students are called upon to begin to develop their professional identities. What kind of lawyer do they want to be? How will they behave when this situation arises in practice? A typical law school course can *ask* students questions like that, but until they are put in a situation that requires them to confront their own decision making process, they won't really know what their answer will be.  I think that when the Carnegie Report called upon law schools to do a better job integrating Professional identity formation into the curriculum, this is the sort of opportunity they were referring to.

In sum, it is nice that the course is getting some attention, finally. But mostly I am proud of Beth, for working hard in law school, thinking through what she needed out of the experience, and now for making her way in her career. And I am proud that she feels like she received a good education at the DU Law School.  Her article is a good rebuke to David Segal's most recent article in the New York Times, which had the headline: "What They Don't Teach You in Law School: Lawyering."  Ha.

If you would like to learn more about how the Discovery course works, read Beth's article, and take a look at the teaching portfolio on the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers website.  Also, please feel free to contact me with any questions - I would be glad to help in any way I can.