Deepening the foundation for legal practice

The school’s foundational Legal Analysis, Writing and Research courses, required in both semesters for all 1Ls, have long served as the cornerstone of how students learn to think and write as lawyers. A third semester, taken in either fall or spring of the 2L year, is now mandatory as well—with options for students to further hone their developing skills in specific areas of practice.

Professor Angie McDuff ’12 (JD), ’18 (LLM), who directs the LAWR program, says the third semester exposes students to “the kind of legal writing they didn’t see during the first year. Students get the opportunity to practice what they’ve already learned, and they get more narrowly into what’s going to be expected in specific areas of practice.”

LAWR III has been mandatory for several years, McDuff notes, but had been taught by a variety of adjunct faculty members, who often changed from year to year, depending on their availability. Now UB Law has three full-time faculty members—Professors George Brown Jr. ’17, Robert Stark and Steph Paskey—dedicated to the third-semester course.

“It’s a lot of work for adjuncts who already work full time,” says McDuff, who was an adjunct instructor herself before she began teaching LAWR. “By offering the third semester taught by individuals who are here full time, students have more opportunities to meet with professors, because they’re here in the building. This has allowed us to allocate more time and energy to providing the regular feedback that the students need.”

The benefit of LAWR III, she says, is the chance to explore how research and writing skills play out in specific practice situations, and to ensure that everyone is working at a high level. “Students come to law school from many different places,” McDuff says. “Some of them pick these skills up quickly. But things are changing rapidly in the profession, and we don’t have time in the first year to introduce students to everything. They gain time in that third semester to learn those things that there’s not enough time to address when they’re focused on essential skills.”

As an example, she says, professors cover the topic of artificial intelligence with more depth in the third semester: looking at the efficiencies AI can introduce to practice, as well as the ethical considerations involved. “The more you use it,” McDuff says, “the more aware you become of how it can save you time and what you’re better off doing yourself.”

The additional three LAWR III professors bring their own legal experience to the classroom, and students can choose their section based on its emphasis: Brown on the law firm experience, Stark on litigation, and Paskey on legislative revision.

“We all offer very different opportunities for our students to continue to strengthen their legal writing skills in manners that will be extremely applicable to practice once they graduate,” Brown says. “We work closely to make sure our classes all have similar work demands and goals, but we have freedom to offer our expertise to our students. I choose to focus my class on private practice to give students the opportunity to experience typical legal research and writing assignments they will be assigned during their summer programs or their first few years in practice.”

“The professors in our first-year LAWR program give our students such an incredible foundation,” Stark says. “I try to help students build on that foundation by helping them apply what they’ve learned through a case file, like they will in practice. I help students focus on the depth of research, followed by clarity and concision to address potentially complex arguments.”

Adds Paskey: “The law abounds with badly written contracts and statutes, with binding legal rules that are vague, ambiguous, poorly structured and stuffed with jargon. My section of Advanced LAWR aims to help students accurately understand what they read, and to fix the problems when they can. Many of the skills they learn are transferrable to anything they’ll write in practice, from emails to memos to briefs.”