Etl Conference 2015

Throughout the month of December, we've been releasing the 16 Ignite-style presentations given at our 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference by ETL Fellows and faculty from across the ETL Consortium. The short videos cover an array of issues, from the innovations and outcomes of law school classes, programs, or curricula, to innovations within the realm of legal education more broadly.

At Touro Law Center, we have developed the 1L Pro Bono Project, a mandatory first-year program that integrates basic doctrinal knowledge, an introduction to professional skills and values, and a commitment to social justice. Our curricular reform is predicated on a multidimensional perspective that conceives of legal education not as a horizontal continuum, but rather as a learning web where 1L students form a central core from which they build outwards, in multiple directions, towards greater competency levels.

In this short presentation from October’s Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference, I talk about preliminary outcomes of Suffolk’s innovation curriculum. The innovation curriculum consists of courses in legal technology, practice management, and the delivery of legal services that form the basis of Suffolk’s concentration in legal technology and innovation and Accelerator to Practice Program. I

At Seattle University School of Law, our goal is to have a comprehensive, integrated skills curriculum. We feel good about our curriculum’s comprehensiveness; we have focused in recent years on integration. Our legal writing and clinical faculty in particular have collaborated extensively over the last several years, including holding a yearly joint retreat. We also collaborate on the Real Clients in the First Year Project, where our first-year legal writing students work on a slice of a pending clinical case or on a live issue from a legal nonprofit. 

Throughout this month, we've been releasing the fantastic Ignite-style presentations given at our 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference by ETL Fellows and faculty from across the ETL Consortium. Faculty discussed an array of issues, from the innovations and outcomes of their school’s classes, programs, or curricula, to innovations within the realm of legal education more broadly.

In this Ignite talk from the 2015 ETL Conference, we talk about the new Problem Solving I course, which is a required course, taught during the 1L Fall Semester. This course introduces students to a standard problem-solving methodology that they can use in a variety of settings, including transactional, litigation, and governmental. This course also stresses the importance of fact gathering. Students participate in five simulations, including an interview each student conducts during the second week of law school.

On October 1, we came from Albany Law School to present on “How an Inclusive Strategic Planning Process Leads to Faculty Adoption of Institutional Student Learning Outcomes” at the 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference in Denver, Colorado. Albany Law’s process of developing learning outcomes began years ago with a conference hosted by Albany Law’s Center for Excellence in Law Teaching (CELT) on “Setting and Assessing Learning Objectives from Day One.” With the momentum and knowledge from the CELT conference and the development of the Albany Law Strategic Plan, which emphasized that “a competency-based curriculum ensures that students achieve the core knowledge and transferable skills necessary to succeed in a fast changing environment,”

At Denver Law, we are following the wisdom that counsels conducting assessment in small and discrete pieces. We will, each year, focus on parts of our JD program and assess learning in each using direct (student work product) and/or indirect (student self-reports) data. An example of the latter is our “Externship Program Professional Identity Formation Project.” At the start and upon completion of doing an Externship, Denver Law students rate themselves on ten items associated with professional identity and identity formation. From these responses, we compute a “Prof ID Formation Index” for each student, and we compare these measures before and after the Externship.

We kicked off the 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference on October 1 with 16 (yes, sixteen!) Ignite-style presentations, given by ETL Fellows and faculty from across the ETL Consortium. We heard about strategic planning, hybrid programs, new curricula, leadership and skills development, and—importantly—lots of collaboration!

Those who attended the 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Conference were among the first to learn about initial results from our national Foundations for Practice study. We will be sharing detailed results over the next several months, but here is a glimpse of what we already know.