Law School 2.0

CELT Conference - March 29 - 30, 2012

The Center for Excellence in Law Teaching, at Albany Law School in Albany, NY, is hosting its first conference on March 29 -30, 2012.  The title of the conference is "Setting and Assessing Learning Objectives from Day One." 

The conference will focus on an important topic in legal education, that of outcomes assessment. Over the last several years, the American Bar Association has been debating several versions of additions to its accreditation standards relating to assessment.  (The first draft of the standards was unveiled at the Legal Education at the Crossroads: Assessment Conference at the University of Denver in September, 2009). Despite considerable resistance from the legal academy, it looks like the ABA is going to pass some form of outcomes-based assessment standards.

Which means legal educators need to understand what is going to be required, and how to go about starting and managing the assessment process. That is what this conference is going to be about.

To view the program, click here.  I will be the opening keynote speaker on Thursday night, as the conference begins.  My topic is "Update on Outcomes Reform in Legal Education."  More information on the conference, and a link to register, can be found here.

 

Storytelling is Fundamental

For those who are interested in the storytelling aspects of lawyering, this post might interest. In it, a cognitive neuroscientist suggests that storytelling is fundamental to us as humans, and explains that his research indicates it is based in a left brain function called "the Interpreter." An illustrative quote:

"...narrative coherence helps us to navigate the world – to know where we're coming from and where we're headed. It tells us where to place our trust and why."

Your Storytelling Brain

The University of Denver hosted the Third Applied Legal Storytelling Conference on July 8 - 10, 2011. Session descriptions, with handouts and video of each session, can be found here.

Applied Legal Storytelling Conference, Chapter 3

The Third Applied Legal Storytelling Conference concluded this past weekend, and a great time was had by all. There were two keynote presentations to start us off on Friday afternoon, and two days of terrific sessions after that. We concluded Sunday night with a Gala dinner at DU's Hotel and Restaurant Management School.  ALS is becoming a very interesting and vibrant subject in legal writing and clinical scholarship. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed hosting the conference, and being a member of the conference committee with Steve Johansen (Lewis & Clark), Robert McPeake (City U. London), Brian Foley (FIU), and Ruth Anne Robbins (Rutgers-Camden).

Session descriptions, handouts and PowerPoints, and video of each session have now been posted on the Storytelling Conference website, and you can find that here.

I also gave a talk during the conference, entitled Finding Lost Stories in the Digital Morass and Emerging Modalities for Telling Them, which was about the use of graphical visualizations of complex data. As I often do, I prepared a website of information to support my talk, which can be found here.

The next Applied Storytelling Conference will be in July, 2013, and we will return to London, the site of the first Storytelling Conference in 2007. Join us!

Presentation at the Legal Storytelling Conference

Earlier today I gave a presentation at the Third Applied Legal Storytelling Conference which I am hosting at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law.  My talk - a work in progress - was entitled "Finding Lost Stories in the Digital Morass and Emerging Modalities for Telling them." 

As a teacher of course (and author of a textbook) on Discovery law, I have long been concerned about the rise of eDiscovery.  I saw this coming in the early 90s when I was practicing civil discovery and PCs were becoming more common, but it has really exploded in the last decade.  The problem is that there is just so much information - data - that we produce every day now, and most of it is captured somewhere.  Email, credit card transactions, a downloaded movie... we engage in many transactions and interactions every day that produce an electronic record.

In litigation, some of that information might be relevant.  In a divorce case, financial records are often at issue.  In a product liability case, the manufacturer of the device or drug created a long paper trail in the development of the item and in its production.  So we have massively more data than we had in the recent past, but obtaining it and using it in litigation can often be prohibitively expensive.  That reality has the potential to threaten our civil litigation system - valid cases may not be brought or properly resolved because of the cost.

How many times in the last decade have you heard the term "information overload?"  A lot, right?  But recently Clay Shirky said something (else) brilliant: "It's not information overload, it's filter failure." I think the world of Prof. Shirky, and I tend to agree with him.  And meanwhile, I have been watching with great interest developments in some computer science departments around the country that might help with this problem. These are folks who are working on the problem of how to manage and use large data sets. It is an emerging discipline called "Visualization."  

We humans have a long history of visual storytelling, and this seems to me the next chapter.  The application of visualization of complex data sets to eDiscovery is an important development.  If you would like to know more about my talk on this subject, look here.

Presentation at Future Ed 3

I gave a talk earlier today at the Future Ed 3 Conference, co-sponsored by Harvard Law School and New York Law School.  I was invited to speak at this conference because one of the organizers read my book Law School 2.0: Legal Education for a Digital Age. I say in that book that the only way out of what I call the "cost/change connundrum" is to leverage technology to make legal education better.  They had already had two versions of this conference (so this one was 3) which generated some great ideas, but all of them cost more money.  

So they put it to me: OK, if you know how to improve legal education without blowing up the cost, come tell us.  Of course, in the book I wrote about how I think technology can (and will) help us address some of the problems in legal education, and it can do so without raising cost.  But I didn't really give specific ideas for how to do that.  Themes, yes.  But specific ideas, prescriptions, no. So that is what I was invited to do in this talk.

I gave the audience three specific ideas.  First, I suggested that we take the typical large first year class (Torts, say) and split it up into three subsections, each of which meets in class with the professor only once a week (instead of three).  Then, have the two classes per week each group "misses" online.  That way, we have better interaction in the smaller groups with the professor, and the basic "coverage" can take place online, with video, tutorials, quizzes, etc.

Second, I suggested that more courses in law school be taught in the form of Whole Course Simulations.  This allows for more integration of the Carnegie Apprenticeships, is more engaging for the students, and provides a practical focus to the learning.  If more of the upper level courses (particularly in the second year) were taught in this way, it would not increase cost.  And it would serve our students better.

Third, I suggested that certain specialized and fast-moving areas of law (such as RCRA or ERISA law) could be taught in a cohort form - that is, where the students are the teachers as much as the Professor is.  Students could be deputized to go out and learn a part of the syllabus and bring it back into the class for further guided study, with a focus on how this area of law might be used in the context of a real client.

If you would like to learn more about my talk at Future Ed 3, you may view my Prezi here.

AALS 2011 - LWRR Session on Assessment

Last week in San Francisco, I was part of the panel presentation on Law School Assessment that was sponsored by the Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research (LWRR) Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) 2011 Annual Conference. I set up this panel with the help of Sophie Sparrow (UNH), and Lori Shaw (Dayton).  Our three-hour session was entitled: How LRW Faculty Can Contribute to Their Law School's Assessment Plan.

As I often do, I developed a web page to support our session, which contains the PowerPoint slides, example documents, and followup information from the session.  You can find that site here.

We had a great time hosting the session, and thank the more than 75 colleagues who attended. 

Web 2.0 Buffet Presentation

On Friday, October 30, I will be presenting about Twitter in teaching and scholarship as part of the Web 2.0 Buffet conference for educators from around Colorado.  This conference is being presented by the eLearning Consortium of Colorado.  For updates about the conference, you may follow it on Twitter @web20buffet. The conference agenda is posted here.

Lexis Publications Board meeting in San Antonio

I just returned from San Antonio where I participated in the Lexis Publications Advisory Board meeting. I have come to enjoy these meetings; my fellow members of the Board are an impressive group, and fun to be around.  I always learn a lot from them too.  We also had several folks from Lexis, some of whom I had not met before, so it was good to meet them.  San Antonio is a beautiful city, especially down by the Riverwalk. Unfortunately, the weather was incredibly hot (not surprisingly) and so we did not get out much.

On the second day of the meeting, I offered a view of the future of law school text publishing. As part of my talk, I discussed the potential impact of the Kindle, and explained how I think electronic publishing is finally maturing, and what I think it will take before it makes significant inroads into law school publishing.  I also explained how electronic publishing and the Skills & Values Series could fit with ePublishing. I am, with Scott Burnham (a professor at Montana Law School) editor of the Series. The S&V books are designed to provide a more active form of learning in all law school courses. Four of these books have been published, and six more are under development (including one I am writing - on Discovery law).  The S&V Series of supplemental texts also each have an online component offering interactive exercises designed to bring to life concepts students are learning in class.  

Of course, the holy grail would be an eReader that had swift web access (faster than the Kindle) and was available in color.  That way, the S&V Series could truly combine the textual material and the interactive online components into an eBook of tremendous value.

ALWD Conference 2009 - Kansas City

The biennial conference of the Association of Legal Writing Directors is taking place today and tomorrow at the University of Missouri - Kansas City.  The planned sessions cover the waterfront, from development of programs, to the evolving roles of program directors, all the way to a technology track. Not surprisingly, my presentation on Saturday will be in the technology track - I will present on the subject of Law School 2.0 and share some of the work I have done with wikis in teaching.

I have been struck during the conference (so far) by how much we focus during these meetings on explaining to our students and colleagues what it is we do. I often find myself rather sick of these discussions, but today I am - reluctantly - appreciating the need for it. In some senses, explaining what we do should be simple. We help students to write legal documents. But for a number of reasons, it seems to me, it is actually not a simple thing to explain. 

Some of our colleagues, unfortunately, still think we teach grammar and punctuation. That is, they think we are technicians, rather than rhetoricians. Of course we do teach a certain kind of writing, but so much more of what we do is teach thinking - or more precisely, legal thinking and legal expression.  Some have called this applied analysis.  Indeed, there is such a need for us to focus on applied analysis, there is very little time to teach grammar and legal citation. 

In addition, over the last 15 years, a rich and diverse body of scholarship about the substance and pedagogy of applied analysis has enriched our field immeasurably, and it is an impressive body of work. Scholarship, of course, is very important to our colleagues. Helping them to understand the richness of our scholarship is something we need to do better.

But this is also a good time for those of us who teach applied analysis.  The various criticisms of legal education all generally agree that our students need more "doctrine in context" - or, put another way, applied learning. In the context of the legal problems we teach with - yes, we teach doctrinal law too - and in the simulated environment in which most of us teach, we are (and have been for many years) doing what the criticisms say we need more of in legal education.  

And so we still have an educational mission with our colleagues in the academy. It is easy to forget this when we are busy with our students. But we can't forget it.  

Law School Assessment Conference

The third Legal Education at the Crossroads Conference will focus on Law School Assessment. It will take place on Friday evening, September 11 and go through mid-Day on Sunday, September 13, and will be hosted at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law.  Mike Schwartz and I are the co-chairs of the conference committee, and with us are the well-known leaders in this field Andi Curcio, Greg Munro, and Judith Wegner. Because assessment in legal education is a very hot topic these days, the conference has already engendered a lot of interest. 

We sent out a request for proposals in May, and the deadline was July 1st.  We received 50 proposals for the conference, and were somewhat overwhelmed by that.  We have spent quite a bit of time over the last week reviewing those proposals (all of which are interesting and well done), and making adjustments to the draft conference schedule.  We hope to finalize the schedule in the next week or so, and notify those who submitted proposals. In the meantime, you may visit the website for the conference here.  Watch that site for updates to the conference schedule, registration information, and logistics (such as hotel and transportation information).

Update: Program descriptions, handouts, and video of each session are available at the Conference website.