Law School 2.0

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.

 

 

A Response: The Issue of Skills Course Supply and Demand

I have noted here a welcome to the law student legal education reform blog Law Schooled.  Having the student voice in this discussion is incredibly important.  There have been numerous thoughtful posts already on their blog, and I encourage you to read it and keep track of it.

A recent post at the Law Schooled blog asked for clarification of something Scott Fruehwald wrote at the Legal Skills Prof Blog: “take as many skills courses and clinics as you can.  If students take more skills courses and clinics, your law school will have to hire more skills professors and offer more skills options.” 

The poster at Law Schooled explained that at her school the skills courses are always full, and it is not clear whether long wait lists have an effect on administration.  It is obvious to students that the large classes are more cost effective for law schools, and smaller classes are more expensive.  And students just don’t understand how signing up for more skills classes will make a difference – that it would actually increase the number of skills classes that are made available.  “Is there a magic number that will signify that enough of us want these courses to push law schools to change the supply of skills courses to meet our demands?”

Scott responded in the comments that it is a question of “allocation of resources,” and noted that some schools have already started to respond to this issue, citing the consortium schools that are part of the Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers project.  (Full disclosure: my own school is a member of the consortium).  And he made mention of the Context and Practice Series (from Carolina) and the Skills & Values Series (from Lexis) (and I am an author and series editor of the Lexis books) as new forms of teaching materials that law professors can use to teach in a more practice-focused way.  He also encourages students to pick law schools that are part of ETL and encourage administration at their own schools to invest in teaching and not new buildings.

The post at Law Schooled brings up a terrifically important issue.  Students want to have a voice, but they don’t know where to put it or how to have impact.  Scott makes some good suggestions, he encourages civility, and even adds a reminder that they will be alumni one day, and being asked for money.  These are all good suggestions, but I wanted to add a few more.

It is true that the power of “voting with your feet” is limited if the demand for skills courses outstrips supply.  If the courses are full, you can’t select it, and you are often left with a traditional doctrinal course.  But there are other things that students can do.  They can vote with evaluations – in most schools administration looks carefully at student evaluations.  They can petition the Associate Dean for more skills courses, and ask the registrar for data on how many students are waitlisted for these courses.  By the way, while you are speaking with your Associate Dean, encourage her not to address the problem solely with adjuncts.  The problem with adjuncts is they often don’t know how to teach in this way, and (because they practice law all day) have trouble providing the formative feedback that these courses require. 

Students can also ask their professors – respectfully – questions like: “Could we work on drafting a contract in this class?” Or: “Could we draft a Complaint and Answer?”  That kind of question might not create instant change, but it would make an impression, and future students might get the benefit.

Finally, a longer-term answer to the question posted at the Law Schooled blog.  It comes from a suggestion I made at the FutureEd3 Conference in New York a year ago, and I often wonder how many students would welcome this.  But suppose you had a Civil Procedure class with a great professor who wanted to incorporate skills more in the class.  Unfortunately, it is a 90-student class, and so that is hard to do.  It meets three times per week, and right now, those classes are mostly traditional “Socratic” method format: going through cases to learn the doctrine of Civ. Pro. from mostly appellate cases.

But suppose the professor taped a full set of those classes for the semester last year – with students in the class asking the usual questions and responding to the professor’s inquiries.  This year, the class is divided into three sub-sections – let’s call them A, B, and C, with 30 students each, and “class” meets three times per week – on M/W/F at 10 a.m.  You are in Section B, which means you do the assigned reading and watch the class online on Monday and Friday, but on Wednesday, you go to the class with the professor “live” and focus on assignments that come out of the doctrine you are learning in the online class and the reading.  (On Mondays, Section A attends the small class, and on Friday, Section C does).  Online during the week, you also participate in a discussion about the cases and doctrine with the professor and fellow students in the course. 

(A few things to note:  First, ABA accreditation standards would not allow this much time spent learning online during the first year.  But it would not prohibit such a course design in the upper levels, and any school can experiment with a course in this way with notice to the ABA.  Second, assume that sufficient coverage of the material needed for "bar courses" is still possible; I believe that to be true, but the case for that is beyond the subject of this post.  Third, the technology to make this work - and well - is not new, and is reliable.)

Sometimes, I think it is students who come to law school with preconceived notions of how classes will go.  Perhaps this comes from the movies, but also (unfortunately) from college classes they have taken.  Professors need to think “outside the box” but perhaps students do too.  How would students respond to such a course design?  If not in the first year, then how about Evidence or Admin Law in the second or third year?  These are all courses that are currently in the curriculum, and making the changes described here would have almost no additional cost.  There would be a need for currently employed faculty to make some significant changes, but I suspect if they did, they would find it much more fun to teach in this way.  We could make significant strides in teaching in a more practice-focused way, and we would not have to hire additional faculty, or push these curricular changes onto our adjuncts.

Students at Law Schooled, would you prefer to attend a class in this format? Do you think it would work?  How could this model be improved?

 

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:

 

 

New Video for Skills & Values: Discovery Practice

My publisher, LexisNexis, asked me to sit down for a video about the Discovery book during the AALS Conference a few months ago, and they just posted the result to YouTube.  It came out pretty well, I think (even though I look old and tired).  It explains how the Discovery book works, and how I use it in my Carnegie Integrated course on Discovery Law:

 

 

If you would like to know more about the Discovery book, you can visit the website for the book here.