ILT 2015
Pathways to Practice Part 1
Featuring: Paula Schaefer, Ryan Anderson, Lucy Jewel, Kristen Tiscione, Ruth Anne Robbins
Paula Schaefer
Talk Title: Tips for Finding Professionalism Lessons Hiding in Plain Sight in Every Casebook
Talk Summary: Traditionally, the doctrinal classroom was focused primarily on legal doctrine. Many casebooks are still written for that classroom. As professors in every course move toward preparing students for practice, we may wonder if we can still use our favorite casebooks. An essential part of legal education today is helping students understand the values of the legal profession. Students need to know what it means to fulfill duties to clients in different settings. They need experience identifying issues that implicate professional conduct rules. They want to know if they can act consistent with their personal values while being good lawyers. In this talk, I provide tips for finding these professionalism issues in the cases and problems that are already in every casebook. The key is finding the lawyers in the casebook. Even when the lawyer is not mentioned explicitly, student can be asked to analyze aspects of the case or problem from the lawyer's perspective. With casebooks from various doctrinal areas in hand, I will track down the lawyers and the professionalism lessons they can offer students. The subjects of this talk is based in part on "Integrating Professionalism Into Doctrinally-Focused Courses" from the forthcoming book Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World (Lexis 2015).
Paula Schaefer is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law. She teaches Business Associations, Civil Procedure, EDiscovery, Legal Profession, and Pre-Trial Litigation.
Schaefer is interested in developing innovative teaching methods to prepare students for practice. She is the author of the Civil Procedure book in West's Developing Professional Skills series and is the author of a chapter in the forthcoming Building on Best Practices: Legal Education in a Changing World. She has developed a simulation that generates thousands of documents that her students use to conduct ediscovery in her Pre-Trial Litigation and EDiscovery classes. She collaborates with Iris Data Services to provide students with a realistic experience using current technology in ediscovery.
Ryan Anderson
Talk Title: “Teams and Technology: How the New Breed of Attorney Operates”
Talk Summary: The days of large firms carrying a quiver of specialized attorneys may be coming to an end. Instead, small firms create and dissolve ad-hoc teams based on their needs.This new generation of attorney uses technology to coordinate their entire lives before and after law school. Tech and productivity expert Ryan Anderson talks about how you can give them an edge.
Ryan Anderson is a successful practicing attorney who refuses to maintain a personal office in any of his 5 locations across 2 states. By developing technology applications for his team, Ryan ensured that no matter where he or his staff were, the work could keep getting done. Ryan is an expert in the confluence of technology and productivity in law firms and develops software solutions to make firms more productive and agile. Ryan is an avid cyclist and tennis player. He has four children under the age of 9. All of whom he hopes will be better tennis players than him.
Lucy Jewel
Talk Title: Old School Rhetoric and New School Cognitive Science
Talk Summary: In this presentation, I expand upon the classical rhetorical concept of logos by applying cognitive science to Aristotle's theory of categories. In law, legal categories form the infrastructure of the law itself. This presentation will address some ways I explicitly address categories in the classroom, beginning with rule-based reasoning and progressing through analogical reasoning, broad vs. narrow categories, finally getting to a point where students can start to criticize all-or-nothing thinking and re-imagining alternatives. This presentation will also address a possible connection between the anxiety and stress experienced by law students and the dichotomous way we teach students to think.
Professor Jewel teaches Legal Writing, Torts, & Entertainment Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law. She came to teach at UT from Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, where, in addition to teaching Entertainment Law, she taught legal writing and legal skills courses and served as Director of Legal Writing. Her teaching is informed by several years of practice experience as a commercial litigator with the New York City firm of Wachtel, Masyr, & Missry, LLP.
Professor Jewel's scholarship focuses on the intersections between culture, law, technology, and rhetoric, with a particular interest in unmasking how rhetorical choices and cultural forces impact legal and social outcomes. Her articles have appeared journals such as the Yale Journal of Law & Technology, University of Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, Buffalo Law Review, and the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, and Technology.
Professor Jewel is a member of the Legal Writing Institute and the Association of Legal Writing Directors. She serves as a member of the Executive Committee for the AALS Section on Legal Writing, and is a founding board member of ClassCrits, an organization of legal scholars dedicated to uncovering the connections between law and inequality.
Kristen Tiscione
Talk Title: Teaching Analysis as More than Arrangement
Talk Summary By focusing more on the forms of reasoning lawyers engage in than on the forms of documents our students produce, we will produce better writers. We’ve done a good job teaching rule-based reasoning, but we need to go deeper. If we shift our focus from the arrangement of sentences on the page to the nature of deduction, its construction, and the creative opportunities it affords, students will learn an enduring skill that transfers more readily from one analytic challenge to the next.
Kristen Tiscione is celebrating her twentieth year of teaching legal research and writing in the J.D. and LL.M. programs at Georgetown Law. Her scholarly interests include classical and modern rhetorical theory as it relates to teaching law, the doctrine of legal writing, and feminist legal theory. As a proud Midwesterner from Chicagoland, she enjoys Vienna Beef hot dogs with celery salt, flaming Saganaki from the Parthenon in Greektown, and a good deep-dish pizza.
Ruth Anne Robbins
Talk Title: Writing the client into the argument: image decision, word-choice precision
Talk Summary: Welding storytelling elements to legal argument enhances advocacy, because we naturally process information as story—comparing new experiences to prior memories. Certain words will trigger stock images from our memory files. A writer can prime the reader in the legal argument by choosing image-summoning words, and placing them in context with the client. Teaching this enables students to move beyond argument arrangement and towards role assumption in their writing.
Ruth Anne Robbins holds appointments in both the legal writing and clinical programs. She has served in a variety of leadership roles in the national legal writing community. Given a minute of time she will offer a thimbleful of thoughts about storytelling or document design’s role in persuasion. Studies say that people who read literary fiction have keener social perception and more empathy—relevant to lawyers. Also relevant: no professional publication is ever double-spaced.