By Adam Stone
Good writing doesn’t come naturally to everyone. “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement,” according to Mark Twain. Yet strong writing is a fundamental skill in the legal profession.
With that in mind, UBalt Law is upgrading its writing curriculum, starting this fall.
“To be a good lawyer, you need to be able to do solid written legal analysis. That’s just fundamental, no matter what kind of law you do,” says Prof. Nancy Modesitt, associate dean of legal analysis and writing.
In addition, the bar exam already demands writing that demonstrate analysis, and it will likely be asking for more. “The Next-Gen bar exam is expected to be even heavier on these legal analysis skills,” Modesitt says. “Students need to be able to do legal analysis effectively, and the more you practice that, the better you’re going to be at it.”
Legal analysis includes “rule-based reasoning, presenting arguments in a coherent fashion, backed by authority,” says Prof. Colin Starger, associate dean for academic affairs. Based on current research, “we now understand with greater clarity that legal analysis is absolutely vital to success in law school, success on the bar exam, and success as a lawyer.”
The best way for students to gain that skill “is through writing and revision, working closely with experts,” he says. With that in mind, UBalt Law has made a number of changes to the writing curriculum.
The new approach
Students will see a big change in how the first-year legal writing class unfolds. Going forward, class size will be pared back from 25 to approximately 15 students. With smaller classes, students will receive more hands-on guidance.
“It’s easier to give better feedback to the students in a smaller class,” Modesitt says. “Reducing the class size allows us to give more time and attention to those students, and it gives the students a chance to get more meaningful feedback.”
In the upper-level curriculum, there will be a new requirement that students produce at least two significant pieces of written legal analysis and receive substantial feedback on that work. It will take several years to fully implement the change, Modesitt says, as the enhanced writing component will need to be woven into a variety of courses.
“We want our existing faculty members to teach written legal analysis in the context in which they’re most comfortable. So we’re taking upper-level elective classes, reducing the class size, and adding the writing component to the requirements for those classes,” she says. “Environmental law is one of the classes that has been proposed as an early adopter of this, but it could be really any upper-level class that currently exists.”
A third change worth noting is the creation of Modesitt’s own position. The newly forged role of associate dean of legal analysis and writing should help to institutionalize this emerging institutional focus.
With the creation of Modesitt’s position, and the hiring of three new faculty in support of the writing program, “We are putting our money where our mouth is,” Starger says. “UB has rightfully had the reputation of producing practice-ready attorneys, and now we’re honing that and getting better at it.”
Stakeholder buy-in
In order to steer this new curricular course, the administration sought extensive stakeholder buy-in from the start.
First, a faculty subcommittee set out to explore the question of what students needed in order to be best equipped to go out and practice law. “That committee produced a lengthy report and some specific recommendations,” Modesitt says. “Then we had multiple hearings among the faculty on the contours of the proposal, and a lot of debate about it. Ultimately, the faculty approved this new approach.”
Some might ask, why now? After all, analysts have been saying for some time that artificial intelligence will be reshaping the way lawyers work in the future, and it could potentially be doing much of their legal writing.
In fact, AI will at best be augmenting lawyers in their written communications — by producing first drafts, for example. It will be up to the lawyers to make effective use of those machine-generated words, Modesitt says, and they’ll need strong analytic skills in order to do that effectively.
Today’s AI applications “don’t really understand hierarchy of authorities, what cases are relevant, or things like that. AI is not well versed in legal analysis generally,” she says. Going forward, it will be “critically important to be able to assess what AI produces.”
The outputs of AI “can look perfectly fine, but if you know how to do legal analysis, you would see major problems with it,” she says. “It is critically important that our students understand the process of creating solid legal analysis, in part so that they can better assess what they see with generative AI.”
All these changes promise to put students in a better position as they tackle the bar exam and embark upon their legal careers.
“Their foundation will be more solid in their first semester, because they’ll have had more time and attention from a faculty member,” Modesitt says. “And they will build stronger skills with repeated exposure to the process of creating written legal analysis.”
Adam Stone is a writer based in Annapolis.