Using CaseMap to Help Students Make the Leap from Legal Analysis to Legal Writing

From the 2005 CALI Conference for Law School Computing

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

In the first-year legal writing course, a cognitive breakthrough must occur for students to have success. There are a number of ways to describe this breakthrough, but one way is to think of it as links in a chain. Each link must follow the other, and only when they are all linked together can the writing step properly begin. When the student can link up analysis of facts and precedent, synthesis of rules, and application of synthesized rules to facts, they can then start their legal writing.

While there are many well established ways of teaching students to build these chains, the evaluation and assessment step typically takes place at the end of the process, when the professor reviews a written product. From this "after the fact" position, the professor must deduce from a problem in the writing where the student went wrong in the pre-writing analysis. What would be ideal would be to have a way to evaluate the "linking and thinking" process earlier. The question, then, is how to evaluate how a student is progressing in building the chain *while they are building it.*

Legal writing teachers have tried many ways of "peeking" into this process. Generally, the methods used all follow some sort of interim evaluation of a written product that focus on each link. But if it were possible to review the full linking process before the writing begins, problems and issues could be identified before they are further compounded by the student starting the writing step before the linking steps are complete. If there were some way to review the student's mental "map" of the case before they started writing anything -- that would help.

Starting in the Fall of 2004, at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law all students in the 1L Lawyering Process class used a software product called CaseMap to list facts of the case problem, collect their research, and develop an outline for their major writing projects. This software creates a data file that each professor can review before the writing step begins. A review of that file can quickly reveal missing facts, gaps in research, gaps in understanding statutory and common law, and difficulties in building the link from analysis to outlining the problem.

I propose to share our work with CaseMap in the LP program, demonstrate how it works, and explain how it can be used to evaluate and assess critical steps in many different law school courses, not just legal writing.

David Thomson
L.P. Professor
University of Denver Sturm College of Law

Category:

Education

Tags:

• CALI conference 2005
• legal education
• law school computing