(Busting) Out of Our Silos: Lessons Learned from a Clinician Taking 1L Legal Writing

Room 110

How can we build an integrated legal skills curriculum that helps our students transfer the beginning skills they learn in their 1L year to advanced capacity in their clinics and externships to practice ready at graduation? For the last several years, legal writing and clinical faculty at Seattle U have collaborated and approached this exciting question in a number of ways, including holding yearly retreats on improving our students’ transference abilities, building a shared vocabulary, and collaborating on assignments so that our 1Ls provide research and writing support to our clinical students on a live issue from a real clinic case (our Real Clients in the First Year Project). These projects have all been great in improving student learning and in creating a supportive community of skills faculty at Seattle U. This year, though, we took our collaboration and teaching for transfer concepts to a new level - our Clinic Director, Lisa Brodoff, sat in on Legal Writing Program Director Mary Bowman’s first-year legal writing course all year. In this presentation, Lisa and Mary will share some of the many the insights that they learned from this process, focusing on ideas that may be helpful for people from other schools who want to get out of their silos and teach for transfer of skills across the curriculum.