Invigorating Conferencing

Introduction

Conferencing with students about their legal writing and analysis is one of the most important parts of a legal writing professor’s job. And yet, many professors first learn to conference in a sink-or-swim spirit, buoyed by advice from generous colleagues about their own impressions and lessons learned.^[1] Even as their teaching careers progress, it remains relatively rare for professors to observe their colleagues’ conferences—whether as part of a formal job-performance review, informal mentorship, or otherwise. This leads many professors to wonder how successful their own methods are and how they might improve their conferencing practices.

Scholarship about conferencing pedagogy published by legal writing professors sheds light on what professors are doing and why, when they conference. By tracing the history of this scholarship over the last thirty-five years, this article identifies the major themes and best practices that have emerged. Effective conferences are dialogic not monologic, collaborative rather than hierarchical, student-centered instead of professor-driven, and intentionally designed to promote reflection and skill transfer.

Understanding this history of conferencing pedagogy can offer reassurance in uncertain times. Despite three decades of changes in how legal writing professors approach teaching and how students approach completing their assignments, the one-on-one conversation about a student’s legal analysis and writing has remained an irreplaceable site for teaching and learning lawyering skills. And as legal education faces another turning point, shaped by Generative Artificial Intelligence (“GenAI”) and changing professional norms, studying this history can help professors determine what to preserve and what to adapt in their own conferencing practices.

The sections that follow expand on these topics. Parts I and II reveal debates and an evolving consensus about conferencing pedagogy. Part I focuses on “traditional” conferences that occur after the professor has provided some feedback on a student’s draft and Part II focuses on “live critique” conferences where the professor shares their feedback with the student during the conference. Applying this history to the current moment, Part III outlines strategies for professors who are selecting a method for conferring with students, seeking to improve their conferencing skills, or rethinking their curriculum.

I. The Canon of Conferencing Pedagogy: Tracing a History from Legal Writing Scholarship

Legal writing professors enjoyed a “pedagogical revolution” in the late 1980s and early 1990s when they centered their teaching around the process of writing itself.^[2] The goal was to enable students to more readily transfer their learning from one assignment to the next, thus better preparing students for legal practice.^[3] Feedback took on a new importance during this transition,^[4] and professors quickly realized the potential that conferences offered as a vehicle for that critical feedback.^[5]

Notably, though, conferencing with students did not originate with the process-approach era. Previously, during the product-approach era that dominated the 1970s and 1980s, professors typically conferenced with students after they had critiqued and graded a student’s assignment.^[6] This is because in the product era, professors taught students to “look behind the product” to understand “how and why the product came into being,” and professors assessed how well the students’ products “communicate[d] the writer’s message and me[t] the reader’s needs.”^[7] The pervasive wisdom in that era cautioned against giving away too much to students and questioned the appropriateness of discussing a student’s writing before grading it.^[8] Conferencing after a student had received comments and a grade often required defending against a disgruntled student’s grade challenge or granting a struggling student’s request for academic support. That context may explain why conferencing was not a popular topic of scholarly inquiry during the product era.^[9]

As the process approach gained traction in the 1990s and the decades that followed, the conference evolved from an administrative obligation to a premier teaching tool and a unique site of student learning that was worthy of scholarly attention.^[10] Subsections A through D below chronicle the history of that evolution as seen through scholarship about conferencing: After early enthusiasm from scholar-professors in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some questions and debates about the practice emerged.^[11] By the turn of the century, scholars were theorizing about effective conferencing practices.^[12] And for the last two decades, the scholarship has featured new teaching experiments related to conferencing, but it has otherwise been marked by an enduring consensus about best practices.^[13] Finally, subsection E below notes the surprisingly minimal pushback conferencing scholarship has received throughout that history.^[14]

A. Early Enthusiasm and Expectations

With the process era’s new focus on teaching lifelong writing and analytical skills, professors in the late 1980s and early 1990s were motivated to observe and cultivate their students’ individual processes for thinking and writing.^[15] Talking to students about those topics in a conference was an obvious means to an end. Many professors gravitated to this new teaching method and were delighted by their positive results; there was a sense early on that some professors had a natural ability for teaching in this style and a resulting recognition that others would need to gain that ability through study and practice.^[16] During this period, three influential scholars provided insight and guidance about the structure of the conference and the respective responsibilities of the professor and student.

Writing in 1989, Professor Richard Neumann identified the most common pitfalls new professors faced in conferencing and he proposed a four-phase structure that would address those pitfalls, beginning with the “preparation phase,” then progressing through the “opening phase,” the “interpretation phase,” and the “closure phase.”^[17] His structure delineates responsibilities for the professor and the student for having a more thoughtful dialogue and, in turn, an effective conference.^[18]

The common pitfalls inspiring Neumann’s structure are varied and nuanced. He observes that professors do not identify what the student misunderstood, which prevents the professor from posing questions that would guide the student to appreciating the “nature and extent” of their “ignorance.”^[19] Relatedly, professors ask poorly formed questions and frustratingly repetitive questions rather than start with what the student knows and then ask questions to help the student incrementally progress toward the requisite new understanding.^[20] Additionally, new professors often triage ineffectively by engaging the student in a dialogue about a topic better suited for the professor’s direct explanation.^[21] For example, the professor need not construct a series of questions to elicit information that is so simple the student could provide it with minimal thought.^[22] Likewise, questioning is unnecessary to elicit information for which the student has had no exposure (e.g., etiquette and norms specific to the legal profession).^[23] In both instances, the professor should explain the relevant information to the student to preserve their time and energy.^[24] Finally, professors often ask questions without a goal in mind, or end their series of questions before the student had reached a state of deeper understanding.^[25]

For the “preparation phase,” the professor should craft an agenda for the conference that covers a “relatively small number” of important issues and that accommodates “the student’s performance, intellect, and personality.”^[26] The professor should consider what questions they might pose to lead to productive dialogues with the student.^[27] And the professor should provide written comments on the student’s draft with sufficient time for the student to review them before the conference.^[28]

The student’s responsibilities for the preparation phase should be to reread their draft, reflect on their professor’s comments, rethink the substance of their writing, and reexamine their writing process, including by reviewing their outlines and notes for the paper.^[29] The overall goal of these preparatory steps is to ensure that the student can speak with their professor about the goals and substance of their draft as well as their broader writing process.^[30]

In the second phase, the “opening phase,” the conference begins with the professor sharing their assessment of the student’s draft.^[31] This sequence is premised on the idea that the student will be too anxious to benefit from discussion until they have a sense of their professor’s judgment.^[32] And the professor’s assessment identifies what topics the conference should focus on that day, thus helping students learn how to analyze their own work.^[33]

The bulk of the conference occurs during the “interpretation phase.”^[34] This third phase is where the professor and student discuss the draft’s strengths and weaknesses in detail so that the student leaves with an understanding of the topics discussed, both at a theoretical level and as it relates to the given draft.^[35] To do so, the professor should use Socratic questioning to “guide” the student through the creative processes of generating and evaluating options for revising problematic text in the draft, ultimately letting the student decide whether and how to alter the draft.^[36]

This third phase can follow two potential sequences, depending on the concerns in the draft. For drafts that present a few large issues, the professor and student may evaluate those issues “theme by theme.”^[37] But for drafts with issues for which the details are important, it can be more effective to discuss the draft “from beginning to end, discussing each theme as it appears.”^[38] Overall, Neumann advocates for a balanced approach that makes students feel as if the professor “wants them to succeed, but expects them to make the painful effort needed to reach professional standards.”^[39]

Finally, in the “closure phase,” the professor addresses any unresolved substantive or emotional issues that arose during the conference.^[40] Before ending the conference, the professor and student should agree on the student’s next steps.^[41] The goal is for the student to leave the conference “persuaded, motivated, and able to articulate the weaknesses and strengths of the critiqued work.”^[42]

Although Neumann’s structure remains influential, it also reflects aspects of a late-1980s conception of law teaching.^[43] Indeed, his approach envisions the professor playing a significant role in shaping the dialogue’s direction.^[44] He expects the professor to lead or guide what transpires in each of the conference’s four phases.^[45] What responsibilities he does give students are either stated at a high level of generality (e.g., “reflecting” on the comments and “rethinking” their draft during the preparation phase)^[46] or they seem to be in tension with some of the work he had already assigned to the professor: If the students had carefully reflected on the professor’s comments, for example, they would have some sense of the professor’s assessment of their draft, and thus there should not be such urgency for the professor to share their assessment of the draft early on in the conference to ease the student’s anxiety. As norms and culture evolved, scholars continued to question and refine the appropriate roles and responsibilities for the professor and the student, ultimately shifting more agency to the student and embracing a more collaborative approach.

In another landmark contribution to early conferencing scholarship, Professors Mary Kate Kearney and Mary Beth Beazley advanced a “five-step structured dialogue” to improve how professors teach writing and analysis skills.^[47] They sought to integrate the Socratic method that law professors used to teach legal analysis with the writing process that composition professors used to teach writing.^[48] Their five-step dialogue begins with a question posed in an assignment’s directions and ends with the final paper.^[49] With conferencing appearing as its own step, Kearney and Beazley’s structure reflects the view that conferencing is integral to a process-oriented curriculum.

At the first step, the professor begins the Socratic dialogue with an assignment that constitutes the “instigating question.”^[50] The professor designs this question to “prompt thinking about a case or a legal issue” so that students can “begin their legal analysis without the teacher’s immediate intervention.”^[51]

At the second step, the student responds to that question in writing with a series of “focused drafts” and “private memos.”^[52] The drafts are “focused” to allow students to devote energy on earlier drafts to substantive analysis alone, and once that content is set, students can devote new energy to communicating that analysis effectively in later drafts.^[53] In their private memos, students critique their own draft and record questions about that draft while they are composing it.^[54]

At the third step, the professor responds by writing comments on the student’s focused drafts and private memos.^[55] The professor provides this feedback with the two related goals of helping the student learn to view their writing through the perspective of their reader as well as to evaluate their own writing.^[56] Styling comments as Socratic questions instead of as directions for editing the text helps with both goals.^[57] By thinking through a response to the reader-based question about their draft, the student learns to internalize the reader’s perspective.^[58] And by thinking through a response to a question about the student’s private memo, the student learns to identify and remedy problems in their writing without their professor’s guidance.^[59]

Next is the conference, envisioned as “a classroom of two,” where active participation is the default because only one student is available to answer the professor’s questions.^[60] Once in this classroom of two, the professor should focus the dialogue on the student’s unique needs as reflected in the student’s drafts, private memos, and participation during the conference.^[61] And the professor should “design Socratic questions to guide the student to realize for themself where revisions are needed, rather than telling the student what to put in the revision.”^[62] This guidance helps the student “take responsibility for recognizing their writing problems and figuring out how to remedy those problems.”^[63]

And finally, the student has the last “word,” so to speak, in the dialogue.^[64] The student responds again to the instigating question with their revised and final draft.^[65] Although the student should continually revise their draft throughout the five-step dialogue, the goal of this last step is for the student to decide for themselves how to revise a final draft based on their professor’s feedback, as well as based on their own anticipations of their reader’s needs.^[66]

The sequence of Kearney and Beazley’s five-step dialogue reflects a norm in conferencing practice that was prevailing at the time, with comments on a draft preceding a conference.^[67] Although Kearney and Beazley do not theorize how feedback in the commenting and conferencing steps should be similar, different, or otherwise relate to one another, the implication of the advice they dole out at each step of their process shows that all their steps are interrelated and reinforcing.^[68]

The key innovation from Kearney and Beazley’s article to conferencing pedagogy is not their advice during the conferencing step about how to use Socratic questions to encourage students’ active participation and self-evaluation skills, which Neumann recommends as well.^[69] Instead, it is their recommendation during the second and third steps that students write a private memo and that professors comment on it as a prerequisite to having an effective conference.^[70]

An impetus for adding a private memo is Kearney and Beazley’s belief that conferences come too late in the assignment cycle. As a result, students cannot remember the ideas, questions, or processes they had in writing the at-issue draft.^[71] In discussing this problem, Kearney and Beazley reveal a significant limitation to conferencing in the process-approach era:

Although the draft should enable the teacher to identify writing problems, it will not necessarily enable the teacher to understand the reasons for those problems. If the student articulates his or her thinking process in the private memo, however, the teacher is in a much better position to diagnose the student’s strengths and weaknesses and to give appropriate advice.^[72]

In other words, there is a limit to how much even the most well-prepared and talented professor can accomplish in a conference based on a student’s draft alone. Unless the student, through good memory or by effective record-keeping, can explain those nonobvious and process-related reasons for the draft’s content and choices, the professor’s feedback will be less individualized to that student’s process and, as a result, likely less impactful. Thus, to realize the “classroom of two,” or at least a productive conversation, the professor needs an engaged student to converse with during the conference.

In Kearney and Beazley’s experience, the private memos not only help avoid those potential shortcomings, but also, they yield other significant benefits: By recording their writing process, students can preserve some independence from the professor. For example, when a student details their “internal debates” and “discarded ideas” in their private memos, and then later decides to use a previously rejected idea in their final draft, “this decision will have been based not only on the teacher’s comments, but also on . . . [the student’s] independent thinking.”^[73] And because students formulate questions in their private memos for the professor to answer in comments and conferencing, students seem more receptive to the professor’s feedback in general—beyond just the topics the student had identified as needing feedback.^[74]

In theory, the requirement to self-critique in the private memos should lead students to be more prepared to conference and more receptive to feedback, but in practice, Kearney and Beazley acknowledge, students often struggle with or are unwilling to critique their own drafts.^[75] As a potential remedy, Kearney and Beazley suggest that professors try offering more specific prompts like “What legal standards did you identify and explain for your reader? On reviewing your document, do you see any legal standards that your reader might need to have explained more fully?”^[76] as opposed to more general prompts like “Which sections in the document contain your best work? Which sections contain your worst work? Why?”^[77] And they note that the progression of private memos results in students taking more initiative in self-critique and self-evaluation such that those specific prompts eventually become unnecessary—students grow to identify their own problems and ask their own questions about their drafts.^[78]

Promising as Kearney and Beazley’s five-step dialogue was, it depended on professors having sufficient time to provide feedback on a series of documents and students having sufficient self-evaluation skills. When other professors found those prerequisites difficult to satisfy, they iterated on the core of Kearney and Beazley’s idea of designing pre-conference exercises that increased the likelihood of the professor having an effective conferencing partner. Indeed, in subsequent decades and through present day, professors have busied themselves trying to solve the problem of how best to facilitate student engagement during a conference.

B. Emerging Debates and Questions

Between the mid-1990s and the end of the century, the process approach became mainstream.^[79] What this entailed in most legal writing courses was students completing multi-draft assignments that professors commented on and then conferenced about before the student submitted a final paper for assessment.^[80]

Enthusiasm for conferencing’s potential endured for professors and was now reportedly shared by students. Informal surveys suggested that professors viewed conferences as an indispensable teaching tool.^[81] And students wanted more and longer conferences.^[82]

During this same period of conferencing’s gaining popularity, there were more detailed accountings of the cost of conferencing on a professor’s time. Jan Levine put it well:

[A]n experienced legal writing teacher who has spent one to one-and-one-half hours reading each of thirty-two student memoranda has already invested thirty-two to forty-eight hours in that task. Half-hour conferences with the students add another sixteen hours. Requiring review and return of the papers to students prior to conferences calls for a two-week work period for a full-time teacher, who can probably only survive four afternoon conferences in a row before his or her brain turns into mush (a result made more likely because he or she spent that morning and the prior evening reviewing papers). Add the subsequent time spent reviewing the rewritten papers, the simultaneous task of keeping the students busy on other projects during the two weeks of conferences (but not interfering unduly with the courses offered by your colleagues), the earlier hours spent teaching the problem, and the hours spent before the semester even began developing the problem, and it is clear that the number of times the pattern for this one assignment can be repeated depends greatly on the hours the teacher is able to commit to the tasks.^[83]

This concern led to a modest but important conclusion: Even with the potential benefits, there is a limit to how many times in a semester a professor can offer the robust assignment cycle of comment, conference, comment again, and grade.^[84] Endeavoring to balance this great enthusiasm for conferencing as a tool for process-oriented teaching with concerns about time management, professors began raising useful questions about how to make conferences more effective.

Debates developed around who should set the agenda for a conference, professor or student, and how much a professor should defer to a student when facing a difference in discussion priorities. At many schools, it became a common policy to require students to bring an agenda or list of questions to a conference.^[85] But in practice, if students appeared unprepared or unfocused, not all professors strictly enforced this policy.^[86] In those situations, rather than let the student flounder or make them reschedule the conference, some professors preferred to intervene and “exercise some control to get the conference finished before the next student arrives.”^[87] This approach resembles how a professor in the classroom might wind a Socratic dialogue down and revert to lecturing before that class session expires.

Other professors, though, thought flexibility in agenda setting was precisely how to have an effective conference.^[88] The theory was that the student “will not be ready to listen” to the professor’s agenda until the professor has addressed the student’s concerns.^[89] So although the professor may have their own items to address in a conference, the student’s concerns should take priority.^[90] If the student’s concerns seemed minor, the professor could try to encourage the student to focus on something more important, but if the student persisted, the professor should yield.^[91] This approach more closely mirrors how composition professors approached conferencing with undergraduate students in the 1980s.^[92]

Ambitious professors opted to hold multiple conferences during a single assignment cycle.^[93] The resulting frequency avoided many of the issues that arose from sharing the agenda with the student. Multiple conferences allowed the focus of the conference to adapt to the stage the student was at in the writing and revision process.^[94] For example, in conferences early on in the writing cycle, Professor Linda Berger “listen[s] to the writer’s summary of where he has been and his plans for where he is going,” and then “act[s] as a supportive fellow writer,” offering “strategies, techniques, and explanations” based on her “experience writing in the same field.”^[95] In conferences later on in the writing cycle, she acts as an “average legal reader,” sharing her reactions to and suggestions for the near-final draft.^[96] Scaffolding conferences in this way had the added benefit of allowing the professor to develop the student’s audience awareness incrementally and at a later point in their drafting and revising process.

Beyond agenda setting, scholarship suggested new pre-conference exercises to concretize the steps students should take to prepare to meaningfully participate in a conference.^[97] Such suggestions were needed even into the late 1990s because many professors still offered general or vague instructions about what students should do to prepare for their conference: Students should “reread” their draft, “reflect” on the comments they received, and “rethink” their analysis.^[98] But students continued to arrive at conferences unprepared or in a passive posture, so professors devised more strategies for prompting students to evaluate their own drafts and to implement the feedback they had received before their conference.^[99]

To encourage deeper self-evaluation before the conference, some professors assigned a pre-conference exercise called the “self-graded draft,” which requires students to “find, mark, and evaluate individual substantive, organizational, or mechanical elements within each part of the document.”^[100] Designed to help students realize when they were missing basic but required elements in their writing, such as an explicit rule, these steps free up conferencing time for the student and professor to discuss more substantive analytical and writing issues like an inaccurate or poorly drafted explicit rule.^[101]

To encourage deeper engagement with the professor’s comments before the conference, some professors would embed an individualized “revision task” in a margin comment about a specific weakness in a student’s draft.^[102] In Professor Carol Parker’s and Professor Jennifer Brendel’s versions of the exercise, the professor requires the student to implement the selected feedback before the conference.^[103] And during the conference, the professor asks the student to explain how and why they revised the weakness in the draft to address the task.^[104] The theory underlying this type of exercise is that by grappling with feedback independently, students are “more likely to realize where they have questions and more motivated to ask them,”^[105] and less likely to “laps[e] into generalized anxieties, passivity, or frustration.”^[106] This is reminiscent of Kearney and Beazley’s suggestion for professors to assign specific questions to prompt students to self-critique.^[107]

In addition to those important benefits, if the student submitted their pre-conference editing exercise before their conference, as Professor Jennifer Brendel’s version of the exercise requires, the professor can then assess whether the student is comprehending the written feedback and able to incorporate it.^[108] When the student’s exercise suggests that they are not understanding the feedback, the professor can adjust the conferencing approach to address “what needs to be explained further or perhaps from a different angle.”^[109]

Finally, and as a slight variation, Professor James Levy saves the revision task for the student to complete during the conference itself: First, the professor demonstrates how to edit a problematic sentence in the draft.^[110] Then, the professor selects a different problematic sentence for the student to revise on their own.^[111] And finally, the professor gives the student feedback on how they revised that second sentence.^[112] This version of the revision exercise avoids the pre-conference exercise, but it still enhances student engagement during the conference and offers an opportunity for the professor to assess the student’s ability to transfer learnings to date, as well as to provide individualized feedback instantaneously.

Despite this sustained attention on conferencing that led to significant consensus around the hallmarks of a successful conference (to facilitate active learning, increase self-evaluation skills, encourage independence in the revision and rewriting process, and develop audience awareness), at the turn of the century, many questions remained about the practice: How many conferences should professors hold? When in the assignment cycle should conferences occur? How long should a conference last? What is the optimal kind of instruction during a conference given the tension between students’ desire for clear directions for how to improve and professors’ preference for asking questions rather than giving answers? Were some topics not suitable for conferencing or better suited for classroom teaching? And how should the feedback the professor offers while commenting be similar, different, or otherwise relate to the feedback the professor offers while conferencing?

C. Examining Efficacy and Evolving Expectations

Just after the turn of the century, Professor Robin Wellford-Slocum published the most comprehensive article to date about legal writing conferences. Having studied the history above, considered interdisciplinary scholarship, and watched videotapes of writing conferences at her law school, she wrote with the goal of helping professors “make effective use of conferences to enhance a student’s abilities to learn legal reasoning and writing.”^[113] Her article responds to common challenges professors face in incorporating an effective conferencing experience into their course, offers a new iteration of Neumann’s four-phase structure for an effective conference, and addresses the role of the professor-student relationship in a successful conference.

Wellford-Slocum adopts the common premise that because the process of writing is individual, teaching it requires significant one-to-one interaction with the professor.^[114] And because neither classroom teaching nor written comments offer sufficient dialogue to achieve this one-to-one interaction, conferencing is necessary.^[115] But she takes this argument a step further, asserting that conferencing is not just necessary for teaching legal writing well, but it is “superior” to written comments as a vehicle for feedback.^[116]

She justifies her argument by appealing to efficacy and efficiency: Because conferencing allows for “a verbal exchange of ideas” about the student’s and professor’s concerns it is “more productive and valuable to the student,” and because the professor can verbalize something in less time than it would take to write a comment communicating the same information, conferencing is “more time-efficient for an over-burdened professor.”^[117]

Starting with the criticisms of commenting, she points out that the process of commenting on a student’s paper requires the professor to respond “in a vacuum” to what appears on the page.^[118] She calls the process of a student reviewing comments passive and devoid of opportunities to actively participate in the problem-solving process.^[119] And she sees comments as susceptible to misinterpretation or blind compliance by the student.^[120]

A professor skilled in the craft of writing comments might nod along while reading Wellford-Slocum’s description of the limitations of commenting, but they would likely remain unconvinced of her overall thesis that conferences are better than comments. If professors are in a vacuum while commenting, that vacuum might be filled with context and clues the professor brings with them about each student based on previous interactions with the student or conversations about the student’s writing, generally, and maybe even that particular draft. Simply put, although the professor is working independently to write comments, they may not need the student present to deduce why the student made what Wellford-Slocum calls a “misguided or ineffective decision.”^[121]

Additionally, her suggestion that students only passively review comments and blindly adopt them^[122] undervalues student effort. Assuming a good faith effort on the part of the student, to implement a professor’s written feedback requires the student to understand the content of the comment, see the problem in their own work, evaluate how best to revise their own work, and then execute the revision and underlying skill more effectively than in their original work. Each of those steps describes active learning, independent problem solving, and exercising agency.

Finally, on a more fundamental level, dialogue is not a panacea for all professors and all students. Sometimes a student cannot or will not divulge why they made a certain drafting decision. Likewise, sometimes a student cannot or will not raise concerns or ask questions of the professor. In those common scenarios and many others like them, the “immediate opportunity for follow-up dialogue” that is present in a conference and absent from comments becomes irrelevant.^[123]

According to Wellford-Slocum, the advantage of comments over conferences is that they are memorialized in writing.^[124] She emphasizes that comments have “enormous value to students,” but she uses memorialization as a reason that a professor facing a time constraint might choose to postpone commenting in favor of conferencing if they cannot fit both in before the submission deadline.^[125] She reasons that such post-submission comments will still be valuable to students if they plan to use that work as a writing sample or “if it is apparent to the student that the comments can be a useful guide on the next writing assignment.”^[126] She acknowledges that students are likely to be more receptive to pre-submission comments than to post-submission comments.^[127] But on both points, the same could be true of a post-submission conference. She does not grapple with that truth, nor does she develop the likelihood that commenting and conferencing are feedback modalities that reinforce each other.

Ideally, Wellford-Slocum would have professors schedule conferences at regular intervals following each key phase in the writing process, much like Berger’s time-intensive approach to conferencing.^[128] She faults institutions for creating student-faculty ratios that make it impossible for some professors to offer “regular, mandatory student conferences that are of a meaningful length.”^[129] She excuses professors who teach in “such programs” from the burden of complying with her advice.^[130] But she encourages compliance for the many other professors whose class sizes make it challenging but not impossible to hold individual conferences.^[131] In her view, conferencing is valuable enough to merit “reassessing time invested in other teaching activities.”^[132] To help professors make these “less-than-ideal curricular choices,” she offers some suggestions.

First, professors can cancel classes during conferencing weeks, substituting individual conferences for class sessions.^[133] Of course, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that a week’s worth of class (roughly two hours in that era), even including any preparation the professor does for those classes (an additional two hours), is only enough time for the professor to meet with sixteen students for fifteen minutes each. As such, this first suggestion would only lessen the professor’s time burden, not alleviate it altogether.

Second, if a professor can only conference once in an assignment cycle, that conference should occur later in the students’ writing process, when they are “actively engaged” in that process and thus “need their professor most.”^[134] Opting out of an early-stage conference is an easier sacrifice to make because the professor can address many early-stage issues in class.^[135] By contrast, later-stage issues are often specific to an individual student and not well suited for classroom teaching.^[136]

After celebrating conferencing’s incredible potential, she invests in describing how professors can make the best use of this teaching method. Building on her study of recent legal writing scholarship, interdisciplinary research, and her law school’s conferencing videotapes, she offers a flexible four-phase structure for a successful conference: “rapport-building,” “problem overview,” “problem resolution,” and “closure.”^[137] She agrees with much of what Neumann described in his four-phase structure,^[138] but she intentionally describes her structure as flexible because conferences “usually move back and forth between phases as the professor and the student explore emerging issues.”^[139]

Although Wellford-Slocum’s structure does not include a “preparation phase,” she agrees with Neumann and joins the majority view that successful conferences require a prepared professor and student.^[140] She argues that it is only useful to conference after a professor reviews the student’s work product and considers the pedagogical purpose of the assignment.^[141] Doing so allows professors to effectively restrict dialogue in comments and conferences to an appropriate range of issues.^[142]

Students must be prepared to discuss any of their own concerns or questions during the conference.^[143] If a professor has provided comments, the student should review and consider them before the conference.^[144] To help students focus their preparatory efforts and “assum[e] the role of a critical self-editor” before the conference, she suggests that professors require students to complete and bring to the conference a self-edit like Beazley’s self-graded draft or Parker and Brendel’s revision task.^[145]

Although preparation is important to her overall structure, Wellford-Slocum makes “rapport building” the first official phase because she sees trust as the foundation on which a successful conference stands.^[146] At the outset, the professor must earn the student’s trust so that the student will be receptive to evaluating and critiquing their own work during the conference.^[147] She defines the desirable student-teacher relationship as collaborative: “[T]here is mutual understanding that it is the student’s and not the professor’s work, and that the professor is lending his or her expertise to the collaboration to help the student become more expert at legal thinking and writing.”^[148] Citing research in cognitive psychology, she urges professors to foster interpersonal relationships with their students and to create a learning environment in which students are motivated and challenged but not anxious or lacking self-efficacy.^[149]

Achieving this collaborative relationship can be challenging because of the power imbalance at play between the professor and the student.^[150] To address that imbalance, which had also concerned Neumann,^[151] Wellford-Slocum draws from her interdisciplinary research to offer specific ideas for how professors can show their respect for the student and invite the student to collaborate with them in the conference. First, professors should be mindful of their nonverbal communication.^[152] This includes affect displays like “smiling, leaning forward towards the student, and maintaining eye contact” to convey interest, as well as rearranging their office to invite a non-hierarchical working relationship (e.g., moving the professor’s chair next to the student’s chair).^[153] Second, professors should employ active listening skills to show interest in what the student has to say and to encourage the student to keep speaking.^[154] Such skills include intentionally using open and closed questioning, verbal and nonverbal reinforcers, brief restatements, limited self-disclosure, and reflection statements.^[155]

Once the professor has established the requisite rapport with the student, the conference can transition to the problem-overview phase, which corresponds to Neumann’s opening phase. Unlike Neumann, however, Wellford-Slocum advocates for the conference beginning with the professor eliciting the student’s concerns and questions about the draft.^[156] Only after the student has shared their views should the professor then add their assessment of the draft’s issues.^[157]

That order serves to reinforce the student’s responsibility for evaluating and revising their draft.^[158] It also strengthens the collaborative working relationship because, in all likelihood, the professor will share some of the student’s concerns and when that is true, the professor can discuss the issue in response to a student’s question.^[159] That posture is often easier than the professor having to initiate a discussion about the same issue that might lead the student to feeling defensive about the resulting draft.^[160] Relatedly, the student might clarify the origin of a drafting error the professor detected without the professor having to ask the student to explain their choice.^[161] And on a practical level, she agrees with earlier scholars’ observations that it can be difficult for a student to focus on a professor’s feedback if the student has remaining concerns that the professor has not addressed.^[162] That said, she adopts the middle ground that in some instances a professor should not focus on a student’s concerns and should instead acknowledge the concerns as valid, but then “make explicit why such a discussion would not be productive at that time.”^[163]

Wellford-Slocum’s problem-resolution phase is similar to Neumann’s interpretation phase: Both constitute the bulk of the conference, and the overarching goal for both is for the professor to guide the student through evaluating and resolving a prioritized set of problems.^[164] And like Neumann, Wellford-Slocum encourages professors to employ Socratic dialogue.^[165] But she also agrees with Neumann that not all issues that arise in a conference are suited for dialogue.^[166] She tasks the professor with sorting issues in real time during a conference to decide what warrants dialogue versus explanation. For something specific like trial procedures, a professor can merely provide the missing information to address a student’s knowledge gap.^[167] For a recurring problem in the draft like a “confusing organization of ideas within a paragraph,” a professor can inform the student about the problem, then select one representative occurrence, then ask the student questions to ensure they know how to identify and correct the problem on their own, and then instruct the student to review the draft after the conference to resolve the remaining occurrences.^[168]

Beyond strategies for questioning, she also offers a few options for how a professor can approach the dialogue in a conference. At times, she suggests, it may help for the professor to assume the role of the intended reader and express to the student what their reaction or confusion is.^[169] At other times, it may be helpful for the professor to ask a series of questions that mirror the order in which an expert would construct the same analysis.^[170] To discuss reorganizing a legal argument, for example, the professor would begin with a question about the student’s ultimate conclusion before asking questions about the support for that conclusion.^[171]

In the closure phase, Wellford-Slocum shares the same end goal as Neumann, but she envisions the student taking the lead: The student should summarize the important points of the conference and articulate next steps for the remainder of the drafting process.^[172] The professor should listen and clarify any misunderstandings or vague steps in the student’s action plan.^[173]

In all, Wellford-Slocum’s contributions to the canon of conferencing scholarship go far beyond her iterations on Neumann’s four-phase structure for an effective conference. One reason her article has earned its place as the most-cited scholarly work on the legal writing conference is her willingness to engage with real constraints professors face and to offer practical advice for recasting the mold to better fit the challenging teaching conditions. In that vein, her assertion that conferencing could, if necessary, replace commenting reflects a desire to question the well-established norm that conferences are in service of comments.^[174] Additionally, her article codifies many of the best practices of that era. This was valuable to any professors in the early 2000s who had not been able to study conference pedagogy from previous scholarship or learn about it from presentations at the annual legal writing meetings hosted by the Legal Writing Institute and the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Finally, her thoughtful discussion of the student-professor dynamic and incorporation of research from other fields on interpersonal relationships invites professors to improve their conference teaching with new techniques and perspectives.

D. Enduring Consensus and Experimentation

The two decades following Wellford-Slocum’s article represent less rapid growth in the status of conferencing and more confirmation of the status quo.^[175] There is, however, increased flexibility as to when and how often a professor should conference during an assignment cycle.^[176] And there is more openness to extracting some benefit from conferences at less opportune times, like after students receive their grades, and in challenging contexts, like conferring with underperforming students.^[177]

But there is no further development of the optimal structure an effective conference should follow or the kind of dialogue that should occur during a conference.^[178] Instead, most scholarship during this period continued to report on experiments with strategies for facilitating more rigorous conference preparation to improve students’ self-evaluation skills and their feedback-implementation skills.^[179]

Factoring in that first-year students often did not have “enough information about legal writing discourse to formulate useful questions—or even to know that they have questions in the first instance,” some professors provided scaffolding for their pre-conference exercises that targeted self-evaluation.^[180] Professors DeSanctis and Murray developed a series of pre-conference questionnaires that evolve over the course of the year as students grow as legal writers and thinkers.^[181] The questions at the start of the year focus on the student’s writing process and comfort with the material.^[182] Once students have had more experience with the discourse, the questions progress to asking about what the student perceives the strengths and weaknesses of the draft to be, and ultimately, to asking questions about how writing choices influence the reader.^[183] Through their questionnaires, DeSanctis and Murray approximate the scaffolded dialogue Berger achieved through multiple conferences.^[184]

Similarly, Professor Sheila Rodriguez acknowledges that first-year students may be “unaccustomed to rigorously examining what they believe they did well” and that they may lack focus in their self-examination.^[185] Believing that giving students more autonomy in the conference helps to strengthen their intrinsic motivation, she designed a “Feedback Form” based on Beryl Blaustone’s Six-Step Feedback Model that students complete after they submit their assignment and before their scheduled conference.^[186] The form asks the student to identify what aspect(s) of the assignment they think they did well and not well.^[187]

Rodriguez uses students’ answers to the form to prepare herself for conferences: For example, when she sees a form that lists several weaknesses, she is aware that she may need to be more directive during that student’s conference.^[188] Or, when her assessment differs from her student’s, she anticipates investing extra time to help a student identify those problems and to work through a student’s potential defensiveness about the draft’s weaknesses.^[189]

Turning to pre-conference exercises designed to strengthen not just self-evaluation skills but also feedback-implementation skills, Professor Constance Centeno and Professor Danielle Tully each created their own three-part process to surround their conference teaching.^[190]

In Centeno’s first part, students submit weekly time sheets as they work on their writing assignment to help her assess their time-management skills.^[191] Seeking to understand where students were spending their time and whether they were spending that time effectively during their writing process,^[192] Centeno uses this information to provide richer feedback to individual students: If analysis is lacking in two different drafts but Student A had spent insufficient time reading authorities for the assignment, while Student B had spent an inordinate amount of time reading the authorities, she can broach the topic of analytical deficiencies from different perspectives.^[193] For Student A, she can discuss spending more time on the assignment; for Student B, she can discuss reading and notetaking strategies to streamline their process and save them some time.^[194] On the other hand, if a student had spent the right amount of time on the right kinds of tasks, she can compliment them on having a successful process.^[195] Although reviewing time sheets may not be something many professors are eager to do, Centeno’s first part is a useful reminder that direct feedback on how students spend their time producing a draft—separate from how well they executed a skill in the draft—can help students see how such choices shaped outcomes in the current draft and how they may recur across projects.

In the second part, students answer a detailed questionnaire after they receive her comments on their draft and before their conference with her about that same draft.^[196] The questionnaire asks students to assess their strengths and weaknesses as to each section in their draft, but in relation to the comments she has provided.^[197] She also asks students to record any questions they have about her comments.^[198] Students must begin the conference by presenting their answers to that questionnaire.^[199] In fact, a completed questionnaire is a prerequisite for continuing the conference—when students arrive with an incomplete questionnaire, she reschedules their conference.^[200] In the last part of the questionnaire, she instructs students to focus on a section in the draft on which she deliberately did not leave any comments.^[201] There, much like Beazley’s self-graded draft, she asks students whether each component of a legal argument was “present and effective,” and whether the writing was “clear, concise, and easy for the busy lawyer to read.”^[202] Thus, the second step is designed to require students to grapple with implementing feedback independently.^[203]

And in the third part, students spend the last twenty minutes of the conference engaging in a twenty-minute “live edit,” which has similarities with Parker’s and Brendel’s “revision task” as well as Levy’s mid-conference “self-editing exercise.”^[204] During the live edit, Centeno and her student discuss the portion of their draft that did not have any comments.^[205] Specifically, they discuss general concepts that arose elsewhere in the draft and that may have also appeared in this other section.^[206] And she uses the student’s answers to the last part of the pre-conference questionnaire to assess whether the student was able to apply their learnings from her comments to another part of their draft.^[207] This last step helps her assess whether students are developing critical analytical skills related to the rewriting process.^[208]

More recently, Tully developed her own three-part process to encourage student independence and investment in the revision process as they prepare to conference.^[209] First, students complete an in-class “reverse outline” exercise: Using a hard copy of the draft they submitted for comments one or two weeks before,^[210] students follow prompts on a worksheet that requires them to “figure out whether the content and organizational structure support the piece’s purpose, and to propose improvements.”^[211] Once they complete the exercise, they pick up their draft with their professor’s comments.^[212] Then, on their own and before their conference, students complete a written reflection.^[213] The reflection questions are process-oriented: “What did you learn about the writing process that you will incorporate into future assignments?” and “Were any of my comments from previous feedback similar to comments on this assignment? If so, what were those comments and how will you address the comments in your revision? If not, why do you think that a particular comment did not appear on this submission?”^[214]

Tully theorizes that her three-part process results in students taking ownership for their revisions because when “students have already found many of the gaps in their work and have thought about what they need to do to fill those gaps, they come prepared to discuss improvement strategies.”^[215] She also theorizes that the unique sequence of the in-class exercise and out-of-class work sometimes leads to an “overlap between student and professor comments,” which “helps students to build confidence in their writing and thinking skills” because it becomes obvious to them that “they are in fact developing tools to evaluate and improve their work.”^[216]

E. Minimal Pushback

To date, conferencing pedagogy has received minimal pushback from legal writing scholars. This is surprising given the absence of empirical evidence to support consensus-based norms for conferencing, as well as the transparent questioning of and frequent tinkering with common aspects of the method.^[217] The criticism that has developed can be seen as two distinct categories, neither of which persuasively discredits conferencing as an effective pedagogy.

The first category doubles down on the product-era concern that professors give away too much to students during a conference. One critic in particular argues that professors coddle students during conferences and that, in turn, students become unwilling to spend their own time revising their drafts and instead depend on their professor to improve their work.^[218] While it is legitimate to be concerned about whether students can work independently and transfer their learnings to future projects, this critique underappreciates the pedagogical norms embedded in modern conferencing practices and overstates the potential risks. Because the professor’s role in a conference is to elicit, not supply, solutions, conferencing done well should cultivate independence, not engender dependency.

The second category of criticism is less about the conference itself and more about how it shows up in the broader status issues legal writing professors face in the academy. These scholars oppose efforts by legal writing programs or directors to require that professors assign mandatory conferences for all students, potentially more than once in a semester.^[219] Such scholars point out that professors for other law school courses are not subjected to any “comparable pedagogical orthodoxy.”^[220] Unsurprisingly, scholars note that whatever value conferencing delivers for students, the practice takes a toll on professors and thus deserves questioning.^[221] The second critique’s concerns about pedagogical mandates and workload are legitimate but they also do not undermine the efficacy of conferencing as a pedagogical method.

Perhaps the most constructive criticism of conferencing is hiding in plain sight, within the scholarship about “live critiquing.” The emergence of live critiquing—a method in which the professor withholds feedback before the conference and instead delivers feedback to the student “live” during the conference^[222]—marked a rejection of the traditional, post-comment conference in which a professor meets one-on-one with a student after reviewing a draft and providing feedback in advance, typically in written comments.^[223] Because scholarship on live critiquing is framed as mere anecdotes about a minority approach to conferencing, it is easy to miss how this scholarship exposes limits of the traditional, post-comment conference. Overall, though, live critiquing scholarship does not discredit conferencing’s value. Instead, it extends the canon by showing how feedback timing and immediacy can be adjusted to achieve the same goals of dialogue, autonomy, and transfer.

II. Including Live Critiquing in the Canon of Conferencing Pedagogy

Live critiquing has existed in legal writing since at least the 1990s.^[224] Although many professors have used live critiques for decades, the scholarship on this method has not been voluminous.^[225] This is in part because of a stigma long associated with this method.^[226]

Skeptics of this method judge it as being a mere shortcut to take if a professor wishes to avoid the labor of providing comments. The logic seems to be that because live critiquing skips over the commenting step that has historically been such a significant part of a legal writing professor’s job,^[227] then live critiquing must be lacking in fundamental ways as a method of providing feedback.^[228] But this hyperfocus on what live critiquing lacks overshadows thoughtful study of what this different method offers.

Though the stigma did not dissuade live-critiquing enthusiasts from continuing to practice this method of conferencing, it may have discouraged practitioners from writing about it.^[229] But over time, as more professors tried and embraced the method, acceptance grew, and the stigma receded. The handful of scholars who have written about live critiquing offer many lessons about how to effectively confer with students about their writing and analysis.^[230] Their work encourages further consideration about the limitations of traditional conferences. Thus, scholarship about live critiquing should be included in the broader canon of conferencing pedagogy.

A. Prioritizing Responsiveness and Collaboration

Professor Alison Julien wrote one of the most influential articles advocating for live critiquing in 2011.^[231] By that time, she had spent approximately five years teaching with traditional conferencing and five years teaching with live critiquing.^[232] She wrote to share the overwhelmingly positive experiences she and her students have had with live critiquing, as well as to identify some limitations and tradeoffs inherent in the method.^[233]

Notably though, her piece, like later pieces by other live critiquers, does not include a direct attack on traditional conferencing. Instead, she transparently shares the weaknesses she observed from her own experience with the traditional conferencing approach that motivated her switch to live critiquing, much like a helpful colleague would share advice about lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid.

Julien devised the following method for live critiquing with her students.^[234] The night before a scheduled conference, she spends twenty minutes reading the student’s paper and writing some notes to herself.^[235] When the student arrives in her office the next day, they do not have a sense of what she thinks about their paper.^[236] But they know they will meet with her for sixty minutes to evaluate the paper’s strengths and weaknesses, and to plan revisions for its upcoming submission, which will be graded.^[237]

The first question Julien asks each student is designed to reinforce the message that she and the student will spend this time collaborating together about improving the student’s analysis and writing: She asks if the student would like to discuss a specific issue first.^[238] Sometimes this leads to starting the live critique in a particular place in the memo with that issue.^[239] But other times it leads her to confirm that they will address that issue during their time together and they will start the live critique at the beginning of the paper’s Discussion section.^[240] From there, Julien reads the paper aloud, line by line.^[241] She pauses along the way so that she and the student can discuss issues and ideas, make comments on the paper, and otherwise edit the text on the computer.^[242] She ends the conference by completing a short rubric while the student sits next to her, and then she prints the critiqued paper and hands it to the student along with the completed rubric.^[243]

By switching to live critiquing, Julien is able to reallocate her time to avoid the weaknesses of her traditional conferencing method.^[244] She starts each student’s conference with their paper “fresh” in her mind from her recent review.^[245] And she is not the only one who seems more prepared. She observes that her students seem better prepared for their live critiques than they were for their traditional conferences, likely because they no longer have “dead time” between their submission date and their conference date.^[246] As many legal writing professors can relate, when Julien used the traditional conferencing approach, she spent more time writing comments on her students’ papers than she did meeting with her students about their papers. She felt that this time allocation was inappropriate and that the time she spent writing comments was “less efficient and effective than it could have been.”^[247]

This shift also eliminates the phenomenon of “wasted” comments. Julien shares a common experience that will resonate with many legal writing professors: When arriving at a trouble spot in a student’s paper, the professor must reread the passage to determine what the student might have intended to communicate and then, consider how to write a comment on the paper that, either through a question or a suggestion, would help the student see the problem and know how to clarify the analysis.^[248] The problem with that process is that sometimes the professor is wrong about the student’s intended meaning.^[249] And when the professor’s premise about what the student was trying to convey was incorrect, the professor’s written feedback is not actually responsive to the student’s writing.^[250] In those instances, Julien felt her time spent rereading the passage and writing the comment was wasted.^[251] But during a live critique, if she reads a passage she does not immediately understand, she pauses to ask the student their intention and then tailors her response for their ensuing discussion.^[252]

Another common and frustrating experience she describes is thoughtfully crafting comments that include positive and critical feedback only to later realize at the start of the conference that the critical comments stood out to the student and had made the student feel defensive or defeated.^[253] But in the absence of feedback before the live critique, her students do not commonly approach their conference from a defensive or defeated posture.^[254] In fact, she has noticed that once the collaborative ethos of the live critique has been established, she is able to make more direct comments conveying critical feedback than she would have been able to when she wrote comments that preceded the conference.^[255] Her sense is that students in a live critique appreciate that her feedback is “meant to help them improve their writing.”^[256]

She also discovered that after conversing with a student about an issue or a revision, she can ultimately write a less detailed comment than she would have when she wrote comments before conferencing, and she can do so without sacrificing any understanding on the student’s part.^[257] For example, after a five-minute conversation with a student about reorganizing part of the paper, a shorthand note from her is enough to jog the student’s memory of how they discussed revising that passage.^[258]

As Julien reflects on her five years of live-critiquing experience, she shares another noticeable benefit to the method, beyond the efficiency and efficacy gains: She perceives an inherent value in students hearing her read their writing aloud.^[259] This change in the mode through which students receive their drafts seems to help students better understand their audience and in particular, the problems that their draft presents to their audience.^[260]

For example, pausing at the end of the paragraph might lead a student to realize that their reader is confused.^[261] Stronger students tend to meet that pause with an explanation of what they were trying to convey at that point in the paper.^[262] This revelation of the student’s intended meaning can lead to a productive discussion about how the student can more effectively convey that message to the reader without confusion.^[263] But for students who do not notice the pause or who do not know how to respond to it, Julien invites them to solve the problem collaboratively, saying “As the reader, I’m a bit lost here.”^[264] She might then suggest they look at the thesis together or work to revise the paragraph to better support the thesis.^[265] And almost all her students can detect smaller-scale issues in their writing like a long sentence or a missing word.^[266]

Helpfully, Julien readily acknowledges that this method comes with potential limitations and tradeoffs. Because she does not spend two weeks commenting on papers before conferencing with students, she is no longer able to have a sense of what most students in her course were able to accomplish with an assignment before she begins the live critiques.^[267] And there is a limit to how many pages a professor can cover with a student during a live critique.^[268] Although she is satisfied with covering six to eight pages in an hour, she flags that this limitation to live critiquing would be more significant for professors who design longer assignments.^[269] Significantly, she also acknowledges some students would likely benefit from reflecting on written comments before their conference, just as some professors would likely benefit from reflecting on potential appropriate responses to the student’s work before that student’s conference.^[270]

Such thoughtful reflections and advice from a well-respected professor like Julien surely made live critiquing seem attractive to other professors, especially since her version of the method offers an approachable middle-ground between the classic live critique where the professor does no pre-reading and the traditional, post-comment conference.

But inexplicably, after Julien’s compelling piece, almost a decade goes by without any other scholarship about live critiquing. Despite many professors enthusiastically using the method throughout the 2000s,^[271] live critiquing continued to not be a focus of scholarly attention.

B. The Belated Supporting Articles

The silence broke in 2019. Three other scholars chimed in with praise for the method. Like Julien, Professors Patricia Grande Montana, Amanda Sholtis, and Susan DeJarnatt each wrote to share their own positive experiences of switching to live critiquing as well as their views on its benefits, drawbacks, and possibilities.^[272] Of course, each professor also brought their own unique perspective to their commentary on the method.

Montana switched to live critiquing fifteen years into her career, so she could speak to those in the legal writing community who were not otherwise eager to throw out their well-established and carefully crafted teaching methods.^[273] Montana’s pitch is that live critiquing offers less stress for the professor, improved communication between professor and student, and enhanced learning for the student.^[274]

Sholtis had used live critiquing beyond the legal writing classroom, “from orientation to bar-exam preparation,” and sought to explain how professors could incorporate formative feedback into their courses by adding a live critique.^[275]

And DeJarnatt chose to write her piece during her last year of teaching legal writing because switching to live critiquing was the “single best change” she made to her teaching in her thirty-plus-year career.^[276]

1. Best Practices and Slight Variations in Method

The live critiquing scholars are mostly aligned in their approach to the method. Any variations in their approaches are slight and serve to suggest ideas for other professors interested in adapting the method for their own implementation.

During their live critiques, the professors spend their time in similar ways and on similar tasks as Julien had described: They read each student’s draft aloud, typically sentence by sentence, pausing along the way for questions and discussion.^[277] They offer a combination of verbal and written feedback as to the current draft and as to the student’s writing and analytical processes.^[278] By the end of the live critique, the goal is for the student to have a sense of what they need to focus on during the revision process.^[279] To help their students remember the details discussed, the professors let the students leave with a marked-up draft reflecting their live critiques.^[280]

But unlike Julien, none of the other professors review their students’ work before the live critique.^[281] Their first time reading their students’ work occurs when they read the draft aloud during the live critique.^[282] Perhaps surprisingly, their live critiques are not any longer than Julien’s; they range from thirty to sixty minutes.^[283]

Aside from these broader themes, there are two unique features to mention about individual professors’ live critiquing methods. Sholtis requires her students to complete an evaluation tool before the live critique so that they can think about their answers to likely discussion questions in advance.^[284] And DeJarnatt intentionally plays two roles in her live critiques.^[285] First, she reads the student’s paper aloud, acting as the intended audience (the student’s “boss” in their mock legal assignment).^[286] Based on that role, she verbalizes her reactions to the draft.^[287] She will say when she is confused and she will ask for information when it is missing from the memo (e.g. what authority supports the assertion when a citation is missing, or what a case is about when an explanation is deficient).^[288] Then, she switches into professor mode to discuss the draft in detail with the student (e.g., why the student picked a case to cite, or what thesis would work for a paragraph).^[289] This role switching during a live critique is a variation on Berger’s approach of changing roles throughout the progression of traditional conferences during one assignment cycle.^[290]

2. Consistent Observations About the Practice

Despite slight variations in their live-critiquing methods, the professors echo many of the advantages Julien had identified. There is no “dead time” for students, and students more readily discuss their writing process. Students also benefit from hearing their writing read aloud, while professors find the process less exhausting. Still, they agree with Julien that drawbacks include the limit on how much ground a student and professor can cover in one session, and the reality that both student and professor may benefit from reviewing or writing comments before the live critique.^[291]

Building on those commonalities, the other live critiquing scholars also contribute their own observations about the method. Presumably because of the quick turnaround from submission to feedback, Montana noticed that her students’ ability to discuss their writing decision made it “simpler” to provide feedback that had more depth and more examples.^[292] In turn, it allowed her to help students prioritize where to focus their revision efforts.^[293] As an example, she explains being able to shift from talking about global issues in a paper to “quickly point[ing] to some examples of [specific issues] as support, and then triag[ing] with the student their order of importance.”^[294]

When DeJarnatt had previously used traditional conferences, she felt that not all students made effective use of the comments and the conference time.^[295] She observed that students often spent the conference explaining or justifying their choices instead of discussing how to revise and improve.^[296] She also noted that it was common for some students to end the conference early saying they did not have any questions and that they understood the comments.^[297] In DeJarnatt’s experience, none of those issues remained after she switched to live critiquing.^[298] She observes that her students’ questions are “much more forward-looking” and that they “focus on what they need to do to improve.”^[299]

Montana acknowledges several new limitations, too. She notes that students may find the method anxiety inducing and if so, that will impede the student’s receptivity to feedback delivered during the critique.^[300] For professors, she reveals that it can be challenging to develop a thoughtful response on the spot.^[301] Likewise, it can be uncomfortable to deliver critical feedback to the student face to face.^[302] She also admits that it is easy to get distracted by details, but that it is important to stay focused on the more important issues.^[303] And she warns that it may not be possible to detect plagiarism or other related policy violations in a live critique.^[304]

3. A Passionate Defense

Although most of the live critiquing scholarship focuses on explaining the pros and cons of the method as it compares to traditional conferencing, DeJarnatt’s piece reveals another force motivating her to write: She sought to “identify and defuse” the myths that “counsel[] against this approach.”^[305]

DeJarnatt vehemently rejects the idea that professors switch to live critiquing to ease their workload and the concern that the method gives student short shrift. On both points, she sets the record straight: “Done properly, live conferences are demanding for the professor and productive for both the professor and the student. They are not the easy way out.”^[306] She adds that her students consistently list live critiques as the best part of her course when they submit their course evaluations.^[307]

Next, she dismisses a concern she has heard from many colleagues about their ability to stay in role and censor their reactions on the spot. For this worry, she supplies the missing confidence. She advises that legal writing professors are “quite capable of maintaining a calm, reasoned approach” and that they do so regularly whenever they work with colleagues on their scholarship and presentations.^[308] And she reminds professors of the simple purpose of the exercise: “Just be the reader and convey how the reader would really respond.”^[309]

Finally, she undermines the belief that live critiquing will prevent students from getting all the information they need. She notes that the same danger still exists with written feedback—with that method, professors also cannot cover every potential problem.^[310] And in fact, with written feedback, the professor may be more likely to offer too much feedback, which makes it difficult for the student to distinguish between serious and minor problems.^[311] By contrast, in live critiquing, professors may still be unable to cover every possible issue, but they can better gauge a student’s understanding and thus, where to focus the discussion.^[312] This forced prioritization is, in her view, “a feature, not a bug” of live critiquing.^[313]

C. Comparing Live Critiquing to Traditional Conferencing

Despite the more limited scholarly attention live critiquing has received to date compared to traditional conferencing, the two methods share many best practices and overarching goals, including promoting active learning, scaffolding skill development, encouraging critical reading and thinking, developing precise and thorough analysis, modeling processes for writing and revising, strengthening self-evaluation skills, improving audience awareness, and increasing skill transfer. As such, for any devotee to one method, it is worthwhile to study the other method’s history. Both bodies of scholarship offer useful lessons for practitioners of the other method. And a professor need not pigeonhole themselves into using only one method—a professor is free to offer both methods in one semester.

To oversimplify, the choice between traditional conferencing and live critiquing comes down to what the professor wants the conference participants (professor and student) to do independently versus collaboratively. For the professor, the choice may be relatively easy: What must the professor make time to accomplish on their own versus what are they capable of doing well with a student in their presence? For the student, the choice may cause the professor some handwringing: What is the professor willing to leave to a student’s discretion to do on their own, which may result in the student not spending their time completing a task productively or correctly?

Before a traditional conference starts, the act of creating a comment about a student’s draft is a labor-intensive process for the professor. It involves (re)reading the draft, diagnosing any potential problems, deciding which of those problems to focus on for this particular student at this specific time in the assignment cycle and the course, and (re)articulating a comment that helps identify the diagnosed problem and determine how to go about solving the problem both for that draft and for future projects.

Those same steps still occur in a live critique, except that the professor expresses their comment aloud in front of the student. Typically, the professor proceeds through those steps at a quicker pace than they would if operating on their own, outside of the conference setting. Although this pace significantly reduces the professor’s time to think through a responsive comment, the hope is that the additional inputs the professor receives from the student’s nonverbal cues as well as the potential for follow-up and collaborative dialogue with the student means that the pace does not compromise the quality of the professor’s feedback. Of course, this hope may never come to fruition for less experienced professors or for professors who do not excel at delivering feedback aloud in a time-pressured dialogue.

Likewise, before a traditional conference, the student’s process for reviewing and implementing their professor’s comments is laborious and often overwhelming. To identify the potential problem the professor flagged in the draft, the student must consider the professor’s comment, and (re)read the associated passage in the draft as well as any relevant sources or course materials. The student must then zoom out and consider how the comment, draft, and (re)readings relate to one another to locate the root of their problem. And then, the student must strategize about how to remove that problem from their current draft as well as from future projects. If the student experiences any uncertainty or confusion at any point in this independent process, they must have the confidence to ask the professor for help and the ability to articulate their question or struggle.

Many of those steps occur in a live critique, except that the student must digest the feedback for the first time in front of their professor. They may also need to do some of the detailed reading in the professor’s office. And they may need to take notes on the feedback the professor is offering to ensure they do not forget crucial information when the conference ends.

Idiosyncrasies for each individual student and the relationship they have with their professor likely dictate whether the student prefers to do these steps of reviewing and implementing feedback in private or in their professor’s office. Doing it on their own can be a rich experience of active learning, so long as the student is engaged in the “right” intellectual struggles of the revision process and not spinning their wheels on an unimportant matter.^[314] In some situations, the absence of any lag time between the student getting stuck and accessing the professor’s guidance is crucial. But in other situations, the awkwardness of the student having to confront and resolve their weaknesses in front of the professor is prohibitive. And if the latter, the risk of the student not internalizing the feedback is significant.

Ultimately, the scholarship has yet to definitively answer whether traditional conferencing or live critiquing is a superior method for conferring with students. As is true for most valid pedagogical methods, the variations involve tradeoffs. For any particular method, there is a risk of the student not engaging enough, of the professor doing too much, of interpersonal issues stymieing potential, and ultimately, of the student being unable to transfer their learning to future writing and analytical projects.

III. Applying this History Today and in the Near Future

Studying over three decades of scholarship about conferencing and live critiquing suggests that the differences in methods are less significant than the pedagogical commitments they share. The core features of both methods point to a consistent set of best practices. Professors should confer with students to:

• Engage students in an active learning exercise;

• Scaffold skill development for individual students;

• Motivate students to engage in critical reading and thinking;

• Guide students in communicating precise and thorough legal analysis;

• Demystify and model aspects of the writing and revising processes for students;

• Build students’ audience awareness;

• Strengthen students’ self-evaluation skills;

• Enable students to transfer these learnings to future projects; and

• Provide students a meaningful moment of mentorship and human connection.

These insights are valuable for professors—new and experienced—as they select a method to use for a particular assignment cycle, and as they evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses in how they confer with students about their writing and analysis. It is also valuable for professors to draw on as they consider how to adapt their curriculum and pedagogy given the uncertain present and immediate future of the GenAI world.^[315]

A. Selecting a Method

For those professors who are in a position of selecting a method for conferring with students for a particular assignment cycle and who would benefit from a more structured thought exercise for that selection process, consider the decision tree below, which draws from the canon and contemplates potential changes that lie ahead in legal education. Ultimately, though, professors should choose a method that best suits them and their students at a given point in an assignment cycle,^[316] with “suits” meaning some combination of what is likely to lead to the greatest receptivity to feedback for students and the greatest career fulfillment for the professor.^[317]

First, as a matter of backward course design, decide which assignments to include in the semester and in what sequence to achieve the course’s learning objectives. Consider whether and how conferring with an individual student, as compared to alternative teaching methods, could help you teach the requisite skills for a given assignment and help your students achieve the intended learning objectives.

After deciding to include a conference in an assignment cycle, study that assignment from the perspective of your students. Anticipate the issues that are likely to arise for most students. Decide which issues are best suited for dialogue with you as opposed to independent work by the student (along with everything such independent work entails, for better and for worse). Aim to prioritize issues suited for dialogue during your conferences. And plan how you would like to engage your students in a collaborative conversation about those issues. What open questions might you use to kickstart a conversation about this topic? What closed questions could you ask if a student needs more guidance towards identifying or resolving problems? Where do you anticipate doing more talking, listening, and questioning?

Given this skeleton of an agenda you anticipate needing to address with most students, estimate how long it would take you to cover that content with your average student. Set your conferencing schedule based on that calculation. Adjust that schedule after considering the time you can allot to each conference given the number of students in your course and the other obligations you and your students will have during the relevant conferencing period.

Consider again your average student and yourself. Decide what, if any, work each should do independently before conferencing. How can you get your average student to arrive at the conference with a decent memory of what they wrote in their draft and why, as well as with an open mind about how they can improve this draft and their processes for future projects? Do your students have enough time to do that work before their conference? And what do you need to do to set yourself up for a successful conference? Do you have enough time to do that work before conferencing with your students?

With inputs around what the agenda should cover, how long each conference can last, and what you want the participants to do to prepare in the time available before the conference, you are in a position to decide if you want to arrange something resembling a traditional conference or a live critique. You can then select any variations of the two methods as described in the canon above, or your own iteration of those practices. Finally, communicate expectations to your students about completing any work beforehand and how they should participate in the conference or live critique itself.

As you put the selected method into practice, consider tracking your reflections about what is and is not working for you and your students so you can continue to refine your selected method for the future.

B. Honing the Craft

Understanding the scholarly foundation for conferencing and live critiquing can also help professors who are invested in improving their teaching in their selected method. The scholarship suggests several measurements for self-assessments and categories for a reflective teaching practice using either method.

A simple and low-tech option is for a professor to jot down notes and observations about their conferences as they progress through the conferencing period. Once the conferencing period has ended, the professor can summarize, synthesize, and reflect on those notes to make plans for the future.

If adding technology is desirable and permitted, a professor could record their conferences for a later review. After the conferencing period, the professor, perhaps along with a trusted colleague or mentor, could review some recordings and provide their reactions. Additionally, or alternatively, each student could review their recorded conference and submit a reflection about the experience. The reflection’s questions need not be framed as an evaluation of the professor’s conferencing skill per se, but the student’s answers to otherwise run-of-the-mill questions like the following could illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of the professor’s conference teaching: “Did the conference create or resolve any point of confusion for you? If so, please describe.” Or “What can you and Professor A do to make future conferences more useful?” And “Is there anything you would do differently to prepare for or engage in the conference? If so, please describe.”

Whether working with a low- or high-tech record, the reviewer could contemplate whether they observed overarching themes like how the professor demonstrated respect for the student, modeled professionalism, and established rapport. They could study the various phases of the conference to see if each phase was accomplishing what the professor had intended, which could account for a professor’s discretionary preferences around things like agenda setting or who leads in wrapping up a conference.

As to the truly spontaneous dialogue about the student’s draft and process, the reviewer can consider the following categories of questions:

Listening and Understanding: Was the professor present and paying attention? Did the professor use active listening skills? Which ones? Did the professor interrupt inappropriately? Did the professor misunderstand what the student was saying such that the student had to clarify their point or repeat themselves? If so, how frequently did the professor misunderstand the student and were there any patterns as to the cause of the professor’s misunderstanding? Did the professor ask follow-up questions appropriately?

Responding: Was the professor responsive to the student’s questions? Would an explanation have been more effective than a question at any point (or vice versa)? Did the student appear to misunderstand the professor? If so, how frequently did the student misunderstand the professor and were there any patterns as to the cause of the student’s misunderstanding? Did the professor give away “too much”? Did the professor marshal course materials the way they intended? Which of the various roles did the professor successfully play (motivating mentor, average reader, modeling professional, etc.)?

Questioning: Did the professor select open and closed questions appropriately? Did the professor ask broad and narrow questions appropriately? Was the sequence of the professor’s questions logical or otherwise defensible given the context? What was the overall effect of the professor’s questioning on the student’s demeanor and participation? Were there missed opportunities to ask a different or better question?

Though the reflection questions are drawn from the scholarship on conferencing and live critiquing, many of them are areas where the scholarship would benefit from further theorization. As you notice patterns in your own teaching in these settings and as you develop your own theories for common pitfalls and best practices, record your ideas in a scholarly work and contribute to this ever-important canon. Thirty-five years from now, it may prove to be the blueprint for professors navigating their way through the next great challenge to the legal writing profession.

C. Preserving Best Practices

As the legal writing profession continues to navigate uncharted territory ushered in by the rise of GenAI, conferencing and live critiquing pedagogy will be tested. Each professor will respond based on their experiences of conferring with students and their experience with GenAI.^[318]

Protectionist instincts might lead some professors to refashion such conferences as a kind of oral exam where the professor can assess the student’s learning “independent” of GenAI. The simplicity of this tactic has some appeal. If two humans are sitting in a room without access to their devices—without access to their agents—then the professor might be able to determine whether the student can analyze and write about the law, and whether the student understands how to improve a written document.

But such a protectionist approach risks ruining conferencing altogether. It comes too close to making the professor an interrogator and the student a suspect with something to hide or defend. Any resulting sense of judgment or distrust the student perceives from the professor will destroy the collaborative relationship that is so important to the student’s receptivity to feedback. And that is to say nothing of its effect on the enjoyment and gratitude students and professors often feel when they participate in a productive conference.

Protectionist instincts may also arise as professors begin adapting other aspects of their curriculum and pedagogy to meet the GenAI moment—how to design assignments, what to have students do for homework versus in the classroom, and how to assess learning and assign grades. As they consider such changes, professors should be mindful of unintended consequences those changes could have on conferencing pedagogy. As has been true since at least the 1990s, conferencing is heavily integrated with other aspects of the legal writing course, thus changes elsewhere in the course often affect the experience and efficacy of conferencing. Simply put, pulling at one thread could unravel several more.

Avoidance instincts and willful blindness are also ineffectual responses to the challenges GenAI presents. A measured response is best: Of course, conferencing pedagogy should adapt as students and lawyers change the processes by which they write and revise. And yet, any adaptations should benefit from the collective wisdom and experience represented in the history of conferencing scholarship.

Contemplating how to balance the necessary adaptations with preserving these core features leads to three lines of inquiry: As students rely on GenAI during the prewriting, writing, and revising processes, what can conferencing still accomplish? What must conferencing still accomplish? And what questions remain unanswered?

1. What Can Conferencing Still Accomplish?

Even assuming a world in which all students heavily rely on GenAI in their prewriting, writing, and revision stages, a professor can still offer or co-create several of the core features of conferencing: The conference could still be a rich exercise in active learning because the professor can engage the student in a productive dialogue about evaluating and revising the draft before them. The dialogue from the student would constitute active learning, even if GenAI were “responsible” for the output that led to the draft at the center of the conference—much like the active learning that occurs when a student evaluates a sample document or their peer’s draft.

By discussing or comparing their reactions to the draft, the student observes how an expert reader (the professor) engages with the draft’s writing and analysis. Observing the reader’s process and noting where the reader’s needs are and are not met by the draft helps the student build audience awareness. When it becomes obvious that the reader needs something the draft does not provide, guided discussion can help the student learn how to communicate analysis that is sufficiently precise and thorough.

Additionally, or alternatively, the professor can model how an expert legal writer would think through and ultimately execute how to revise the draft to meet the reader’s needs and other relevant standards. In this new age, this step might come to include the professor modeling how to prompt GenAI for revision options and guiding the student through an evaluation of the output—thereby modeling a professional skill of how a lawyer critically evaluates a draft from a colleague or an agent.

And a conference should always offer a meaningful moment of mentorship and human connection.

At first glance, this analysis of what conferencing can still accomplish may be comforting. But professors do not have the luxury of stopping at what conferencing “can” do; meeting this moment requires confronting the reality of what conferencing “must” do in this new era of teaching and learning.

2. What Must Conferencing Still Accomplish?

Conferencing must continue to motivate students to engage in critical reading and critical thinking. And conferencing must continue to offer students an opportunity to practice and strengthen the art of (self-)evaluation. These skills are critical to the legal profession’s success as they allow lawyers to be effective “humans in the loop” who monitor GenAI.^[319] Preserving these core features of conferencing will likely be quite challenging, especially as the tools develop quickly and professors race to learn to use the tools efficiently.

Before GenAI, the choice between spending the time to perform critical reading, thinking, and evaluating, or not had real consequences: Typically, analysis suffered if a student skipped or cut corners on these steps. But with GenAI, there is at least the perception if not the reality that a student can prompt GenAI to produce analysis at a sufficiently high level without the student doing the requisite critical reading, thinking, and evaluating “independently” (by their own human selves). And if students repeatedly offload these steps to GenAI—if students do not invest their own human efforts in experiencing that kind of intellectual labor—they will rob themselves of the opportunity to strengthen those skills. This devolves into a compounding error where students who never learn those foundational skills cannot effectively evaluate or critique GenAI’s results to improve the resulting product.

One simple way of addressing this challenge could be to name it for students. Expressly acknowledge that the options for cutting corners are more powerful than ever. Expressly acknowledge how time consuming and frustrating it can be to reach and maintain a level of critical reading, thinking, and evaluating. Then share the opinion that it has never been more important for students to build and practice these foundational skills. And finally, pitch conferencing as a unique site for learning these skills. The conference is an opportunity for the student to have a mentor who will “hold space” for the student to reckon with some aspect of the writing or revising process. But where this reckoning might seem overwhelming or unproductive on their own (and thus where offloading to GenAI will be most tempting), the professor, as a guiding mentor, can supervise the struggle to ensure the student is progressing not only in the at-issue writing or revising process, but also in their overall skill-acquisition and learning process.

3. What Questions Remain Unanswered?

In addition to these questions of what conferencing can and must still accomplish in this new era, there remain many unanswered questions. The list below includes five examples of some significant unanswered questions now facing the legal writing profession.

How will professors use conferencing to scaffold skill development for individual students? GenAI can “mask” a student’s writing and analytical abilities.^[320] Such masking makes it difficult for professors to assess where students are in mastering lawyering skills from their written work product—and here, “work product” is an inclusive term, capturing assessment opportunities not only from drafts, but also from preconference exercises. What this means for conferencing pedagogy, is that the signals professors have come to rely on about a student’s progressing capabilities may be incorrect, muted, or gone entirely. In turn, the professor may be limited in their ability to adjust their preparations for a specific student’s conference, to tailor the agenda to a specific student’s needs, and to provide highly individualized and impactful feedback to a student.^[321]

In a sense, professors would be back to solving the problem Kearney and Beazley faced before they introduced the private memo. The path forward may be yet another adaptation to pre-conference exercises, but professors who choose this route would be well served by studying the scholarship and understanding what has been tried, why the professor-scholar created that exercise, and what its strengths and weaknesses were. An alternative path could be for the professor to do more triaging and adjusting “live,” during the conference itself. Even if the professor is not interested in switching from traditional conferencing to live critiquing, studying the live critiquing scholarship could prove useful in better understanding strategies for more spontaneous assessing, triaging, and adjusting while the student is present.

When should professors schedule conferences? Wellford-Slocum opined that professors should schedule conferences when students “need” their professor “most.”^[322] And she estimated that that need arises later in the drafting process because other early-stage issues could be covered in the classroom or through other methods.^[323] But if GenAI becomes students’ constant companion, it is no longer obvious when in the prewriting, writing, and revision process students “need” their professor, nor is it clear which tasks can be covered effectively in the classroom or by other methods (including by GenAI). Thus, professors should reflect on their specific courses and students when determining the most strategic time to hold a conference. Some may see value in advancing the timeline such that conferences occur earlier in the assignment cycle to incentivize students to progress through the early writing stages on their own human labor instead of offloading to GenAI. But others may have a different idea for creating the same incentive; they may opt for shorter but more frequent conferences throughout the assignment cycle, similar to Berger’s traditional conferencing approach.

Should professors provide written comments before a conference? If GenAI can provide written feedback instantaneously, will students be more or less willing to wait for a professor’s written comments? If students are less willing to wait, some professors may reduce or eliminate their commenting period and try something closer to a live critique. But if students are willing to wait, the lag between the student’s submission and the conference will be less important to some professors because they are no longer relying on students to “remember” drafting choices—GenAI is making those choices, and the student can access a record of their prompt history. In that case, professors would be free to take the necessary time to provide quality comments before conferencing. Maybe this protected time would help professors provide their nuanced and expert feedback that “competes” with GenAI’s feedback.

Will students be more or less receptive to their professor’s feedback? Several scholars have noted that if students engaged in pre-conference exercises that required them to self-assess, they were more receptive to a professor’s feedback.^[324] But if students offload pre-conference self-assessment to GenAI, such receptivity may be lost. Or maybe students will become very receptive to feedback on their draft because they do not see it as a reflection of their own self (their own writing and analytical abilities); they see it as GenAI’s output that they care about to the extent it affects their grade.

Will students be more or less invested in the revision process? Relatedly, professors have reported that requiring students to implement feedback before the conference led to greater investment in the revision process.^[325] But if students offload the implementation and revision process (by uploading their draft with the professor’s comments into GenAI and instructing the agent to produce a new draft that implements the feedback in the comments), that investment in improving the draft may be lost. Or maybe if students no longer feel personal ownership over their writing, the professor’s critical comments may be less likely to offend the student. In turn, maybe professors will have more leeway to make direct comments during the conference, resulting in a more productive feedback experience.

These and other related questions may remain unanswered, but professors who are teaching legal writing will be forced to proceed with limited information and their best guesses. Professors with different instincts and opinions about the answers to these questions will employ different strategies in the upcoming academic years. As professors make these choices, they should share their impressions with colleagues and eventually contribute their theories about the evolving practice to the canon of conferencing pedagogy.

Conclusion

Legal writing professors and scholars have celebrated the value of conferring with students one-on-one about student writing and analysis since the last “pedagogical revolution” of the late 1980s and early 1990s. That revolution, from the product approach to the process approach, emphasized teaching students transferable lawyering skills and prompted professors to optimize the feedback they offered during traditional, post-comment conferences and live critiques. Over the ensuing thirty-five years, professors have experimented, refined, and shared methods that make such conferencing central to how students learn to think and write like lawyers.

The precursors for another pedagogical revolution are present, though its contours remain ill-defined. As that next revolution takes shape, legal writing professors have a deep well of wisdom from which to draw in forming strategies responsive to the changing dynamics ahead. The canon of conferencing pedagogy confirms that conferring with a student one-on-one about the student’s legal writing and analysis provides an unparalleled opportunity for learning. And the canon offers a window into how and why professors approach conferring with students, as well as guidance on the best practices that are worth preserving.

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1. See Karin Mika, The History of Legal Writing (2010), https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/fac_presentations/25 [https://perma.cc/XS8Q-UUX2] (describing the evolution of the legal writing community through AALS-sponsored workshops in the 1980s, legal writing conferences hosted by the Legal Writing Institute and the Association of Legal Writing Directors from the 1990s and after, as well as newsletters and peer-reviewed journals); see also Am. Bar. Ass’n, Sourcebook on Legal Writing Programs 348 & n.31, 350 (J. Lyn Entrikin ed., 3d ed. 2020) (noting that new professors “need guidance” in learning how to comment on students’ papers and conduct effective conferences, but then recommending a volume from the LWI Monograph Series with over a dozen scholarly articles for advice on commenting, while only offering generic advice to “read relevant materials” and to “watch either a video or a demonstration” for advice on conferencing).

2. Ellie Margolis & Susan L. DeJarnatt, Moving Beyond Product to Process: Building a Better LRW Program, 46 Santa Clara L. Rev. 93, 98 (2005) (“Influenced by composition and rhetoric theory, [legal writing] scholars began to advocate for a focus on the process of analysis and writing, instead of limiting their role to merely correcting errors [in the written product].”); but see John A. Lynch, The New Legal Writing Pedagogy: Is Our Pride and Joy a Hobble?, 61 J. Legal Educ. 231, 234 (2011) (questioning the “article of faith of the new writing professoriate” that “most of what was done in the Dark Ages of legal writing, before the creation of the cadre of full-time teachers that began in the 1980s, was wrong and yielded bad results” and doubting that there was ever a “significant difference between the new or old legal writing pedagogies over what students should learn about legal writing”).

3. Jo Anne Durako, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Diane Penneys Edelman, Brett M. Amdur, Lorray S.C. Brown & Rebecca L. Connelly, From Product to Process: Evolution of a Legal Writing Program, 58 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 719, 721–22 (1997).

4. J. Christopher Rideout & Jill J. Ramsfield, Legal Writing: A Revised View, 69 Wash. L. Rev. 35, 73 (1994) (explaining that the new goals in the process-approach era were “to coach as well as to correct students in their writing; to diagnose not only the writing product of students but also their process and development as legal writers”).

5. Margolis & DeJarnatt, supra note 2, at 99 (“Rather than merely correcting papers after they were written, [legal writing] professors began to intervene in the writing process through critiques and conferences on works in progress.”); see Mary Kate Kearney & Mary Beth Beazley, Teaching Students How to “Think Like Lawyers”: Integrating Socratic Method with the Writing Process, 64 Temp. L. Rev. 885, 888–89 (1991) (“[R]ather than give feedback to students on their final drafts alone, writing teachers who use the writing process ‘stop time’ and give their students feedback throughout the composing process.”).

6. These were often called “postmortem” conferences. Linda L. Berger, Applying New Rhetoric to Legal Discourse: The Ebb and Flow of Reader and Writer, Text and Context, 49 J. Legal Educ. 155, 178 (1999).

7. Durako et al., supra note 3, at 722.

8. Id. at 726.

9. And even for inspired professors who might have been called to produce such scholarship, carving out the time for the professor’s own writing projects felt virtually impossible. See Marjorie Dick Rombauer, First-Year Legal Research and Writing: Then and Now, 25 J. Legal Educ. 538, 543, 547 (1972) (including conferences in the list of reasons that the workload for teaching legal writing was higher than other law school courses in the early 1970s); Maureen J. Arrigo, Hierarchy Maintained: Status and Gender Issues in Legal Writing Programs, 70 Temp. L. Rev. 117, 163, 167 (1997) (making a similar point citing scholarship from the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, and describing legal writing professors’ pursuit of scholarship as “prohibitively costly, both financially and personally” because they do not receive institutional support, their pay scale may require them to supplement their work during nonteaching time, and they do not receive mentorship for producing scholarship as they are not on the tenure track); see also Sue Liemer, The Quest for Scholarship: The Legal Writing Professor’s Paradox, 80 Or. L. Rev. 1007, 1021 (2001) (noting that although doctrinal and legal writing professors both spend time preparing for class, teaching classes, and fulfilling service obligations, the typical doctrinal professor is otherwise available to produce scholarship while the typical legal writing professor is not similarly available until after they have provided “individualized teaching for students, by critiquing papers, holding conferences, and generally answering questions”).

10. This increased interest in conferencing pedagogy followed a similar trajectory as the growth in scholarship about the broader field of legal writing pedagogy. See Terrill Pollman, Building a Tower of Babel or Building a Discipline? Talking About Legal Writing, 85 Marq. L. Rev. 887, 887 (2002) (discussing how surveys conducted in the 1980s of legal writing scholarship revealed some books and articles published in the 1970s, but “direct inquiry about the nature of the field” and “serious study” of legal writing pedagogy did not occur until the late 1980s).

11. See infra Parts I.A, I.B.

12. See infra Part I.C.

13. See infra Part I.D.

14. See infra Part I.E.

15. Margolis & DeJarnatt, supra note 2, at 98–99; Durako et al., supra note 3, at 722; Rideout & Ramsfield, supra note 4, at 73–74.

16. Richard K. Neumann, A Preliminary Inquiry into the Art of Critique, 40 Hastings L.J. 725, 728 (1989) (“Just as good litigators often cannot accurately explain their own work habits, even an instinctively effective critiquer frequently cannot articulate the art of the critique . . . . [S]ome find liberation in teaching with a technique that the classroom is simply too cramped to permit, but others feel bewildered or even oppressed by an art that is not self-evident.”).

17. Id. at 738. Although the audience for this article was broader than just legal writing professors, and although he called it a “critique” and not a “conference,” Neumann’s article is one of the earliest and oft-most cited in the canon of conferencing pedagogy. He defined the critique as “an institutionalized setting in which a teacher, in direct discussion with individual students about their performances, propels those students into professional habits of analysis and creativity.” Id. at 726–27. He observed that the “literature is almost barren of investigation into [the conference]” despite conferencing being the “basic medium” of clinical teaching and a widely used method in other law school courses. Id. at 728.

18. Id. at 762–63.

19. Id. at 730, 738.

20. Id. at 736, 738 (noting that to give the dialogue direction, professors should ask leading questions and remind students of what they already know, but professors should never ask questions that would force students to guess).

21. Id. at 730, 736, 738 (“Triage is the essence of dialogue economy. A dialogue should not even be attempted unless the point to be made is a significant one.”).

22. Id. at 736 (“A misconception is worth [dialogue] only if it is symptomatic of ineffectual thinking or if the student needs to be persuaded of his or her own ignorance.”).

23. Id. (a “misjudgment” caused by “mere fatigue, lack of time, misapprehension of lawyers’ customs, or oversight that is understandable in a neophyte” should be addressed but “it would hardly merit the investment of [dialogue] unless, . . . the student stubbornly resists the idea that a misjudgment has in fact happened”).

24. Id. at 736, 738 (“Unless there is ample time and the student seems to be enjoying the dialogue, a teacher not only wastes time but appears to be playing a guessing game if the dialogue is pursued to elicit something simple.”).

25. Id. at 738.

26. Id. at 763.

27. Id.

28. Id.

29. Id. at 764.

30. Id.

31. Id.

32. Id.

33. Id. at 766. Neumann emphasizes that the professor should be thoughtful in how they deliver their assessment. Id. at 764. And he describes at length potential “barriers” to critique that stem from the hierarchical nature of the novice-expert relationship including “role masks” adopted to conceal insecurity; students’ “compulsion to mimic” rather than think independently; “persuasion-mode thinking” that treats dialogue as an argument to be won; and other anxiety-driven defenses that prevent genuine collaboration and learning. Id. at 753–62.

34. Id. at 766–68.

35. Id. at 768.

36. Id. at 724, 730, 768.

37. Id. at 767; see also id. at 745 (citing Teresa Amabile, The Social Psychology of Creativity 79–81 (1983) (dividing the creative process into stages: a recognition stage, a preparation stage, an option-generation stage “in which the largest reasonable number of potential solutions are hypothesized,” an option-evaluation stage “in which potential solutions are tested either analytically or empirically for effectiveness,” and a decisional stage “in which the evaluations are compared and the best option chosen”).

38. Id. at 766.

39. Id. at 768.

40. Id. at 769.

41. Id.

42. Id.

43. Rooted in Donald Schön’s “reflective practitioner” framework, Neumann casts the professor as an expert diagnostician guiding students to develop habits of professional reflection and critique. See id. at 725–27 (citing Donald Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987); Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983)). Modeled on Schön’s metaphor from architecture and design studios, Neumann’s view of the professor is consistent with the transitional moment of the late 1980s—it has elements of the hierarchical pedagogy characteristic of the Langdellian paradigm he criticized and it incorporates some of the progressive ideas from the clinical legal education movement he complimented. See Anthony G. Amsterdam, Clinical Legal Education — A 21st Century Perspective, 34 J. Legal Educ. 612, 614–18 (1984); Jamie R. Abrams, Legal Education’s Curricular Tipping Point Toward Inclusive Socratic Teaching, 49 Hofstra L. Rev. 897, 908–09 (2021).

44. In many ways, the roles and responsibilities he assigns approximate those of a professor teaching a doctrinal course and using Socratic questioning to manage dialogue with a student on a topic. The difference, of course, is that in the conference setting, no classmates are listening to the exchange.

45. Composition scholars have also observed that before composition professors fully embraced the process approach to teaching composition, their student conferences were “highly directive.” Laurel Johnson Black, Between Talk and Teaching: Reconsidering the Writing Conference 14 (1998) (“First generation conferences . . . [were] brief [and] held regularly with students as they work[ed] on papers individually”; “teachers set[] the agenda and dispens[e]d information to students.”).

46. Neumann, supra note 16, at 764.

47. Kearney & Beazley, supra note 5, at 885–86. Inspired by a 1989 instructional video by the University of Puget Sound Law School that suggested using a “gentle Socratic method” to stimulate student participation in conferences, Kearney and Beazley sought to incorporate the method sooner in the assignment cycle—in assignment design and commenting, not just in conferencing. Id. at 886–87 n.7.

48. Id. at 885–86 (“Good writing results from good thinking. It makes sense, then, that tools used to teach good thinking should be combined with tools used to teach good writing when law students are learning how to conduct written legal analysis.”).

49. Id. at 886.

50. Id. at 890–91.

51. Id.

52. Id. at 891–92.

53. Id. at 892–93 (“When the legal writing teacher requires students to write focused drafts, the students are encouraged to master the content of their legal analysis before moving on to the content-dependent questions of style and mechanics.” (citing Nancy Sommers, Responding to Student Writing, 33 Coll. Composition & Commc’n 148 (1982)).

54. Id. at 894 (noting that composition professors in a famous study had students dictate their thoughts into a tape recorder while writing to create a map of their composing process that others will analyze) (citing John R. Hayes & Linda S. Flower, Identifying the Organization of Writing Processes, in Cognitive Processes in Writing 3, 3–29 (1980)). Kearney and Beazley leave to the professor’s discretion how to implement the private memo assignment. But they offer many options for professors to consider for successful implementation: Students can write their private memo as a separate document or as embedded footnotes in the focused draft of the assignment they had been working on. Id. at 895.

55. Id. at 897 (“If written effectively, these responses can be a major factor in teaching students how to research, write, and revise their writing independently.”).

56. Id.

57. Id. This shift in how professors approached commenting also reflected the “pedagogical revolution” from teaching how to produce a written product to teaching the process of writing.

58. Id. at 901.

59. Id. at 900, 902 (“Whenever the teacher revises for the student, the teacher robs the student of the opportunity to engage in independent decision-making, and thus stunts the student’s growth as a writer.”).

60. Id. at 904, 906.

61. Id. at 905.

62. Id. at 904.

63. Id.

64. Id. at 906.

65. Id.

66. Id. at 906–07.

67. See, e.g., Rideout & Ramsfield, supra note 4, at 89 (describing conferences as “[r]elated” to comments and instructing professors to do more than merely “rehash” the comments in the conference; instead, during the conference, professors should “develop further legal thinking by using the student’s reactions to the comments”).

68. For example, the professor should motivate students to prepare for their conference (step 4) by scheduling it to occur after the student has had time to digest the professor’s comments on their draft (step 3) and with enough time for the student to continue revising the draft before it is due for a final grade (step 5). Kearney & Beazley, supra note 5, at 904. And the professor can motivate the student to prepare to conference (step 4) by providing a “final comment” at the end of the marginal comments, summarizing the professor’s overall reaction to the student’s draft (step 3) and to assign “specific conference preparation,” such as additional reading or research. Id. at 905–06.

69. Neumann, supra note 16, at 724, 730, 768.

70. Kearney & Beazley, supra note 5, at 894–97.

71. Id. at 894.

72. Id. at 895.

73. Id. at 896–97.

74. Id.

75. Id. at 895 n.38.

76. Id.

77. Id. 895 n.37.

78. Id. at 895.

79. Rideout & Ramsfield, supra note 4, at 51–54; Margolis & DeJarnatt, supra note 2, at 98–99.

80. Rideout & Ramsfield, supra note 4, at 53, 72; Margolis & DeJarnatt, supra note 2, at 99; Jan M. Levine, Response: “You Can’t Please Everyone, So You’d Better Please Yourself”: Directing (Or Teaching In) a First-Year Legal Writing Program, 29 Val. U. L. Rev. 611, 617 (1995).

81. In one of these surveys, when asked to rank the most important activity for teaching legal writing, several respondents rejected the prompt’s premise and “noted that the different tasks,” including commenting and conferencing, were “so interrelated that it was difficult to rank them separately”; and even the respondents who ultimately ranked commenting as most important observed that comments were often linked to or bolstered by subsequent conferences. Anne Enquist, Critiquing and Evaluating Law Students’ Writing: Advice from Thirty-Five Experts, 22 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1119, 1126–28 nn.7–12, 1136, 1141, 1151, 1160 (1999).

82. Durako et al., supra note 3, at 738–39, 739 n.59.

83. Levine, supra note 80, at 623 (footnote omitted).

84. The Association of Legal Writing Directors and the Legal Writing Institute have collected data about hours professors spend conferencing with students through the annual surveys they have sponsored from 1998 to 2014. See Survey, Ass’n of Legal Writing Dirs., https://www.alwd.org/resources/survey [https://perma.cc/R7X9-AY8S] (last visited December 19, 2025) [hereinafter Survey] (providing links to each annual survey report). The average number of hours spent in conferences in 1998, which is the earliest year for which such data is available, was 50 for directors of legal writing programs and 67 for a full-time legal writing faculty member who was not a director. See id. (1999 Survey, Questions 19 & 43).

85. Durako et al., supra note 3, at 727, 733. Professors from Villanova’s Legal Writing Program co-wrote this article about the changes they made to their curriculum and pedagogy after learning about process-oriented techniques at the 1994 Legal Writing Institute Conference. Id. at 721 n.8, 723. They explained what components they added to their curriculum as well as how they modified their “traditional product-oriented approach”—including conferencing—to fit their new process-oriented pedagogy. Id. at 723. They viewed conferencing as a product-oriented method because it was “professor-centered” in the way that it “require[d] professor editing and thinking, and the student simply incorporate[d] the professor’s comments with minimal interaction or active learning.” Id. at 725 n.24. To bring conferencing into the process era and rebalance “effort and commitment from both professor and student,” id. at 727, the professors stripped agenda-setting from the professor and assigned it to students. Id. at 733.

86. Maureen Arrigo-Ward, How to Please Most of the People Most of the Time: Directing (or Teaching in) a First-Year Legal Writing Program, 29 Val. U. L. Rev. 557, 586 (1995).

87. Id.

88. Mary Barnard Ray & Claudia M. Carlos, Close Encounters of the Word Kind: Focus and Flexibility in Student Conferences, 10 Second Draft 21, 21–22.

89. Id. at 22.

90. Id. at 21 (advising professors to limit themselves to two to three points because “[c]onference time is limited and your control over the conference is even further limited”).

91. Id.

92. Muriel Harris, Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference 5–6 (1986) (“The role of the teacher in all this is to assist in the process, to help each writer move through draft after draft of the writing and focus on his or her unique questions and problems.”); Black, supra note 45, at 15 (“Tied to the growing use of a process approach to writing, second generation conferences are student-centered and focus on active learning as opposed to passive absorption.”).

93. Berger, supra note 6, at 179.

94. Linda L. Berger, A Reflective Rhetorical Model: The Legal Writing Teacher as Reader and Writer, 6 Legal Writing 57, 79 (2000) (citing Donald M. Murray, The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference, 41 Coll. Eng. 13 (1979)).

95. Berger, supra note 6, at 179.

96. Id. at 183 n.161.

97. See, e.g., Mary Beth Beazley, The Self-Graded Draft: Teaching Students to Revise Using Guided Self-Critique, 3 Legal Writing 175, 175–76 (1997).

98. See, e.g., Durako et al., supra note 3, at 727–28, 733 n.45 (instructing students to review a range of content from earlier in the same assignment cycle including peer editing comments, the professor’s responses to the student’s self-evaluation comments, and the professor’s comments on the student’s draft, but not providing details about how to review the different information in each document and only providing students with the general guidance that they were expected to “use the half-hour conference time as an opportunity to clarify comments they did not understand and discuss more fully comments on issues that they selected as important to developing their writing skills”).

99. See, e.g., Carol McCrehan Parker, Writing Throughout the Curriculum: Why Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve It, 76 Neb. L. Rev. 561, 587 (1997); Jennifer Brendel, Tools for Teaching the Rewriting Process, 12 Persps.: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 123, 124–25 (2004).

100. Beazley, supra note 97, at 175–76. Just six years after her co-authored piece with Kearney, Beazley wrote another article on her own, inspired by her “frustration during teacher-student conferences,” to introduce a pre-conference exercise to promote independence in the revising process. Id. at 176.

101. Id. at 176 (acknowledging that the exercise “will not necessarily ensure that students write a perfect rule, a perfect explanation, or a perfect application,” but noting that “it will ensure that, for better or worse, the writer has articulated the needed elements on paper” and “[i]f those elements are substantively wrong or otherwise ineffective,” the student and professor can address those errors).

102. Parker, supra note 99, at 587 (describing the “revision task,” generally, but not providing an example of a margin comment assigning that task); Enquist, supra note 81, at 1141 (in an informal survey, Mary Lawrence and Mary Beth Beazley each indicated that in their written comments on a student’s draft, they might include a short assignment for the student to complete before their conference, e.g., reorganizing a paragraph or writing a case brief). For Professor Brendel’s exercise, as part of the commenting process, the professor “identifies for each student one specific, discrete portion of the assignment [specifically tailored to that student] to rewrite and submit prior to the conference.” Brendel, supra note 99, at 124–25. This portion should be “manageable” and “provide a good test of how well the student understood the written comments.” Id. at 124. For example, the professor might task the student with rewriting “one specific section or paragraph block (e.g., one case illustration, one application paragraph, the Question Presented or Brief Answer, the umbrella section)” or the professor might assign the student to review their draft “more globally (e.g., underlining and rethinking all thesis sentences, outlining the entire Discussion section).” Id.

103. Parker, supra note 99, at 587; Brendel, supra note 99, at 124–25.

104. Brendel, supra note 99, at 125.

105. Id. at 124.

106. Id. at 124–25.

107. See supra notes 52–59 and accompanying text.

108. Brendel, supra note 99, at 125.

109. Id.

110. James B. Levy, Legal Research and Writing Pedagogy—What Every New Teacher Needs to Know, 8 Persps.: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 103, 106 (2000) (describing the practice but providing no further details about how the professor should select a problematic sentence to model revising or for the student to practice revising).

111. Id.

112. Id.

113. Robin S. Wellford-Slocum, The Law School Student-Faculty Conference: Towards a Transformative Learning Experience, 45 S. Tex. L. Rev. 255, 257 (2004).

114. Id. at 262.

115. Id. at 262–63, 265.

116. Id. at 267.

117. Id. at 267, 274 (“Providing thoughtful written comments on a fifteen-page paper might take one to two hours to prepare. The teacher and student might discuss the same paper, with increased depth of analysis, in an equal or less[er] amount of time.”).

118. Id. at 267.

119. Id. at 267–68.

120. Id. at 268.

121. See id. at 267.

122. See id. at 267–68.

123. See id. at 268.

124. Id. at 267.

125. Id. at 274.

126. Id. at 274 n.70.

127. Id.

128. Id. at 277–78 (“In a first-year legal writing course, . . . ideally, a professor would schedule an initial conference after students have drafted a detailed outline or ‘zero draft,’ another conference after they have completed a working draft, and a final conference when students are preparing to edit and revise their final draft.” (citing Elizabeth Fajans & Mary R. Falk, Comments Worth Making: Supervising Scholarly Writing in Law School, 46 J. of Legal Educ. 342, 353 (1996)); see also Berger, supra note 6, at 178–79, 181–82.

129. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113, at 273 n.65 (citing the ALWD & LWI survey results from 2003 that showed an average of forty-four students per semester, but noting that the “average was achieved only by dropping from the survey results the twelve responses received from schools in which legal writing professors taught in excess of sixty students”); see also Survey, supra note 84 (providing links to each annual survey report).

130. Id. at 273 n.66.

131. Id. at 273.

132. Id.

133. Id. at 274.

134. Id. at 277–78.

135. Id. at 278.

136. Id. at 278–79.

137. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113, at 299–300.

138. See Neumann, supra note 16, at 763–69.

139. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113, at 300.

140. Id. at 279, 283.

141. Id. at 279. But if constraints do not allow this level of preparation, she offers two alternatives: The professor can review the student’s work during the first few minutes of the conference. Id. at 281. Or a professor could review drafts in advance, take private notes to serve as discussion points during the conferences, but not provide students comments on their draft before the conference. Id. at 282. In outlining these options, she does not refer to this as a “live critique” or otherwise label this style of conferencing. Id.

142. Id. at 279–80.

143. Id. at 283.

144. Id.

145. Id. at 283–84 (citing Beazley, supra note 97, at 178–80; Parker, supra note 99, at 587).

146. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113, at 299–300.

147. Id.

148. Id. at 295.

149. Id. at 289.

150. Id. at 305.

151. Neumann, supra note 16, at 753–62.

152. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113, at 301.

153. Id. at 303–04.

154. Id. at 305.

155. Id. at 306. Examples of a “reinforcer” include saying “Uh huh” or nodding along during the dialogue. Id. at 307. A “restatement” is when the listener restates a word or phrase the speaker used in the hopes that the speaker will expand on that topic (e.g., “Getting stuck?”). Id. For self-disclosure, a listener shares an honest and brief story about their own experience in the hopes of connecting to what the speaker had just shared. Id. at 309–10. And in a reflection statement, the listener characterizes or labels something from the speaker’s statement to demonstrate empathy and encourage the speaker to continue sharing (e.g., “You sound pretty discouraged”). Id. at 308–09, 336.

156. Id. at 311.

157. Id.

158. Id. at 311–12.

159. Id.

160. Id. at 312–13.

161. Id. at 313.

162. Id. at 313–14; see Ray & Carlos, supra note 88, at 21–22.

163. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113, at 314. For example, if a student’s draft presented organizational issues but the student wanted to talk about word choice, Wellford-Slocum suggests the professor say something along the lines of: “I appreciate your concern about sentence structure and word choice; this is something that all writers face when editing their work. However, there are some larger-scale issues that really should be considered first. Ultimately, focusing our attention on the large-scale issues first will save you time in the end.” Id. at 314–15. The professor could continue, “After you have had an opportunity to consider how these larger-scale issues might be incorporated into your paper, and have redrafted your paper into a more final version, that would be an ideal time to discuss the finetuning points with which you are appropriately concerned.” Id. at 315.

164. Id. at 300.

165. Id. at 327 n.307, 330.

166. Id. at 326; Neumann, supra note 16, at 736, 738.

167. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113, at 326.

168. Id.

169. Id. at 322.

170. Id. at 328.

171. Id. And like Neumann, she offers additional considerations and advice for working through challenging circumstances that may otherwise impede a student’s successful conferencing experience. These circumstances range from students who present as defeated and unprepared, argumentative, or resisting independent thought. Id. at 332–46; see also supra note 33.

172. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113, at 346.

173. Id. at 347.

174. See Enquist, supra note 81, at 1141 (quoting Jan Levine’s survey response about the importance of connecting comments with conferences: “The crucial factor in the student’s successful reception of the comments (or understanding of what is behind the comments), . . . is giving the student a chance to meet the teacher and speak with him or her about the paper, the comments, or life in general.”).

175. See Amy Vorenberg, Strategies and Techniques for Teaching Legal Analysis and Writing 25, 30 (2012) (e-book) (confirming best practices including conferencing once per semester, ensuring students prepare for conferences, and optimizing the conference to cover the agenda); Joel Atlas, Lara Freed, John Mollenkamp, Andrea Mooney & Ursula Weigold, A Guide to Teaching Lawyering Skills 61–63 (2012) (suggesting conferencing after students have prepared an outline, a working draft, and the near-final draft but acknowledging that the “ideal may not be viable” and leaving to professors to weigh the “benefits and limitations” of conferencing at different points in the writing process); Diana Donahoe & Julie Ross, Legal Writing Pedagogy: Commenting, Conferencing, and Classroom Teaching (2013) (e-book), https://legalwritingpedagogy.lawbooks.cali.org/chapter/conferencing [https://perma.cc/P532-PXME] (last visited Jan. 30, 2026) (“[C]omments should stand on their own and the conference should be a chance for the student to ask questions about the paper and try to incorporate some of the suggestions from the comments into the writing or rewriting process.”).

176. See Christy DeSanctis & Kristen Murray, The Art of the Writing Conference: Letting Students Set the Agenda Without Ceding Control, 17 Persps.: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 35, 37 (2008) (welcoming the different contexts in which a conference occurs—be it a conference that a student requested or that a professor mandated, be it a conference about an in-progress draft or an already graded assignment); Donahoe & Ross, supra note 175 (noting that professors hold conferences “at a variety of points in the writing process,” adjusting the goals of the conference to fit “the stage of the writing process at the time of the conference and the specific goals of the professor in holding a conference at that stage.”).

177. See Cassandra L. Hill & Katherine T. Vukadin, Now I See: Redefining the Post-Grade Student Conference as Process and Substance Assessment, 54 Howard L. J. 1, 10–11, 38 (2010); see also Emily Carter, Clear the Way to Better Writing: Use a Conference to Cure a Problematic Draft, 25 Persps.: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 92, 94 (2017) (advice from the author, a “writing tutor to students in the bottom quarter of the legal research and writing sections,” on strategies for conferencing with a student who only anticipates minor edits but whose draft requires a major redraft).

178. See supra notes 17–42, 137–173 and accompanying text.

179. For context, the ALWD/LWI annual survey in 2010 reported that the average number of hours spent in conferences was 38.84 for directors and 49.13 for non-directors. See 2010 Survey, Questions 54 & 82. And in 2014, which is the last year for which such data is available, those numbers were 36.5 for directors and 46.2 for non-directors. See 2014 Survey, Questions 54 & 82; see also Survey, supra note 84 (providing links to each annual survey report).

180. DeSanctis & Murray, supra note 176, at 39.

181. Id.

182. Id.

183. Id.

184. See supra notes 93–96 and accompanying text.

185. Sheila Rodriguez, Using Feedback Theory to Help Novice Legal Writers Develop Expertise, 86 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 207, 221–22 (2009).

186. Id. at 218–19, 223–24. Blaustone’s steps are as follows: (1) “The student identifies the aspect(s) of the assignment that she thinks she did well.” (2) “The teacher responds solely to those items that the student has identified in Step 1.” (3) “After responding to the items that the student has identified, the teacher discusses other strengths in the writing.” (4) “The student identifies the aspect(s) of the assignment that she thinks she did not do well.” (5) “The teacher responds solely to those items that the student has identified in Step 4.” (6) “The teacher discusses other difficulties in the writing.” Id. at 223.

187. These questions mirror Blaustone’s Steps 1 and 4. Id. But they are stated at a high level of generality, much like those described at supra notes 77, 98 and accompanying text.

188. Id. at 223.

189. Id.

190. Constance Mueller Centeno, A Recipe for Successful Student Conferences: One Part Time Sheets, One Part Student Conference Preparation Questionnaire, and a Dash of Partial Live Editing, 18 Persps.: Teaching Legal Res. and Writing 24, 24 (2009).

191. Id.

192. Id.

193. Id. at 25–26.

194. Id. at 26.

195. Id.

196. Id. at 26–27.

197. Id. at 27. Specifically, her form instructs students to study her comments and then, she instructs students to identify strengths, weaknesses, and questions regarding her comments for five categories—“Macro Organization,” “Thesis paragraph,” “Implementation of CREAC and development of each part,” “Writing (including clarity, conciseness, punctuation, sentence structure, etc.),” and “Analysis of relevant law and focus on issue presented.” Id.

198. Id.

199. Id.

200. Id.

201. Id. at 27–28.

202. Id. at 28.

203. Id. Anecdotally, Centeno reports that “all [her] students came prepared with specific questions” and that conferences benefitted from “dialogue driven by the student.” Id. She also observed that the questionnaire helped her “quieter” students become more comfortable asking questions or expressing concerns during the conference. Id.

204. Id.; see Parker, supra note 99, at 587; Brendel, supra note 99, at 124–25; Levy, supra note 110, at 106. Each student’s conference with Centeno ranged from forty-five minutes to one hour. Centeno, supra note 190, at 29.

205. Centeno, supra note 190, at 29.

206. Id.

207. Id. Centeno emphasized, however: “Importantly, the live edit did not involve a line-by-line, word-by-word edit. Rather, the live edit focused on discussing general concepts with the students, including implementation of CREAC and clarity/conciseness of writing” Id. Sometimes she would work with a student on a specific sentence “either by having the student edit what was in the writing or by rewriting a few sentences completely,” but even those discussions were “more general, as the student was required to rewrite the memorandum after the conference.” Id.

208. Id. at 28. Because the thrust of this last step is assessing whether her students have learned some higher order skills, she intentionally timed it to occur after students had received written feedback from her, fearing that without the benefit of that experience, students would not be able to “fully understand the new legal writing and analysis concepts they were learning.” Id.

209. L. Danielle Tully, Reverse Outlines: Fueling Revision & Preparing for Writing Conferences, 32 Second Draft 9 (2019).

210. During this one- to two-week period, Tully comments on and grades the students’ submissions. She notes that the “time away from their work” allows the students to “reencounter[] it with purpose” and from the perspective of their audience. Id. at 12.

211. Id. Tully notes that Kearney and Beazley’s private memo inspired her to include a column in her worksheet for students to propose improvements (or “fixes”) to the problems they identified in their own draft. Id. at 12 n.13.

212. Id. at 12.

213. Id. at 10.

214. Id.

215. Id. at 12. Tully’s observation here echoes similar reflections by Kearney and Beazley, Parker, Brendel, and Centeno. See supra notes 78, 105–106, 207–208 and accompanying text.

216. Id.

217. Indeed, researchers in adjacent fields like composition, sociolinguistics, and education have continued to study methods for conferring with students. See Carolyn P. Walker & David Elias, Writing Conference Talk: Factors Associated with High- and Low-Rated Writing Conferences, 21 Research in the Teaching of English 266, 266–67 (1987) (dispelling the common conception that the proportion of who talks in a conference determines its success and clarifying that what determines its success is the content of the discussion, particularly keeping “the focus on the student and the student’s work”); Michele Eodice, Telling Teacher Talk: Sociolinguistic Features of Writing Conferences, 15 Rsch. and Teaching in Developmental Educ. 11, 15 (1998) (collecting sources and describing pertinent studies about who does the communicative “work,” who determines the topic of focus, and who initiates a shift in topic); Margaret Price, Karen Handley & Jill Millar, Feedback: Focusing Attention on Engagement, 36 Studies in Higher Educ. 879, 879–80 (2011) (viewing feedback as “an aspect of the social practice of learning” and exploring “the factors which influence the ways in which students engage with (or disengage from) feedback”); Rachelle Esterhazy & Crina Damşa, Unpacking the Feedback Process: An Analysis of Undergraduate Students’ Interactional Meaning-Making of Feedback Comments, 44 Studies in Higher Educ. 260, 260–61 (2019) (describing recent research on the evolution of conceptualizing of feedback as a process instead of as a product and the resulting interest in studying student engagement with feedback); Julia Bleakney, Michael Mattison, & Jennifer Ryan, “I Was Kind of Angry”: Understanding Resistance to Feedback in Two Tutor Education Courses, 17 Praxis: A Writing Center J. (2019) (acknowledging the enduring truth of Nancy Sommers’s observation in 1982 that composition professors did not “know in any definitive way . . . what effect, if any, [a professor’s] comments have on helping [their] students become more effective writers”); Elizabeth Molloy, David Boud & Michael Henderson, Developing a Learning-Centred Framework for Feedback Literacy, 45 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Educ. 527, 528 (2020) (analyzing students’ “feedback literacy,” meaning “students’ ability to understand, utilise and benefit from feedback processes”); Juuso Henrik Nieminen & David Carless, Feedback Literacy: A Critical Review of an Emerging Concept, 85 Higher Educ. 1381, 1381 (2023) (critically reviewing the first forty-nine published articles on feedback literacy).

218. Stewart Harris, Giving up Grammer and Dumping Derrida: How to Make Legal Writing a Respected Part of the Law School Curriculum, 33 Cap. U. L. Rev. 291, 299–300 (2004). Note, however, that Harris had a narrow conception of what counted as a “conference” where such “coddling” occurred: “I say, ‘writing conferences’ to distinguish such conferences from traditional office hours meetings between faculty and students to discuss legal issues. As noted previously, I include meetings with seminar students in this latter category, because, in such meetings, the focus is almost always on the substance of the student’s argument, rather than the punctuation or style in his or her seminar paper.” Id. at 300 n.14. Many legal writing professors before, during, and after 2004 would characterize the work they engage their students in during a “conference” as focused on “the substance of the student’s argument.” See, e.g., Ray & Carlos, supra note 88, at 21–22 (featuring a sample conference conversation in which the professor attempts to steer the dialogue away from concerns about punctuation to issues with organization and depth of reasoning).

219. Lynch, supra note 2, at 235–36 (citing Liemer, supra note 9, at 1021). Indeed, some have even argued that professors should spend their time in more lucrative ways, such as producing traditional legal scholarship. Harris, supra note 218, at 296, 307–08.

220. Lynch, supra note 2, at 236.

221. Id. at 231, 235–37, 238 n.34.

222. Some professors also grade the student “live” at the end of the critique; this practice is a smaller subset of live critiquing called “live grading.” See Kirsten Davis, Alison Julien, Jason Palmer & Mark Wojcik, The Pedagogical Method of Live Commenting and Grading (Stetson University Virtual Legal Writing Conference Feb. 2012), http://www.stetson.edu/ law/academics/lrw/webinars.php (last visited Jan. 30, 2026) (noting that each presenter had been live critiquing for many years). This article focuses on live critiquing, not live grading.

223. Professors typically wrote comments, but some professors provided audio recordings of their comments. See Enquist, supra note 81, at 1134 nn.17, 19; Daniel L. Barnett, “Form Ever Follows Function”: Using Technology to Improve Feedback on Student Writing in Law School, 42 Val. U. L. Rev. 755, 759–65, 767–69, 771–73 (2008).

224. See Enquist, supra note 81, at 1137 n.23 (in an informal survey from the late 1990s, Joseph Kimble encouraged professors to “consider reading, critiquing, and grading the papers with the student present”); see also Davis et al., supra note 222 (noting that each presenter had been live critiquing for many years); Barnett, supra note 223, at 765–67, 783–84 (discussing Barnett’s pre-2008 experience with trying live critiquing and ultimately discontinuing the practice).

225. See infra Parts III.A, III.B (identifying and describing six articles devoted to the topic).

226. See Susan L. DeJarnatt, Live Conferences: The Beauty and Importance of Conversation, 36 The Second Draft 1, 2 (2023).

227. See Kearney & Beazley, supra note 5, at 897 (describing commenting as “the most important task the legal writing teacher performs”).

228. See DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 5.

229. Experienced and respected professors such as Ellie Margolis, Mark Wojcik, Sarah Ricks, Ruth Anne Robbins, and Kristen Murray are described as practitioners and advocates of the method, but they did not publish scholarship about live critiquing. See DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at n.4; see also Amanda L. Sholtis, Say What?: A How-to Guide on Providing Formative Assessment to Law Students through Live Critique, 49 Stetson L. Rev. 1, 1 n.* (2019) (crediting Joseph Kimble as the technique’s pioneer though he did not publish on the topic). Wojcik did present on the topic in 2008 and as part of that presentation, he posted a summary of student survey results about live critiquing on SSRN. Mark E. Wojcik, Results of an Informal Student Survey on the “Live Grading” Experience (presentation at LWI Biennial Conf. 2008), http://ssrn.com/abstract=1161176 (Jan. 30, 2026).

230. See infra Parts III.A, III.B.

231. Alison E. Julien, Going Live: The Pros and Cons of Live Critiques, 20 Persp: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 20 (2011).

232. Id. at 20.

233. Id. at 20–25.

234. Julien had learned about the method from other professors in the legal writing community. See Davis et al., supra note 222.

235. Id. at 21.

236. Id. at 21–22.

237. Id.

238. Id. at 22.

239. Id.

240. Id.

241. Id.

242. Id.

243. Id.

244. Id.

245. Julien helpfully explains that because commenting on students’ papers takes so long, there is a considerable lag for both the professor and the student between when they last meaningfully worked on the paper and when they conference about the paper. Id. at 20, 22. The professor may have commented on a student’s draft a week ago or two days before the conference, but they did so during an intense work period of commenting on thirty to forty other students’ papers that were about the same topic. Id. at 20–21. So, understandably, it would be difficult to remember details about the specific student’s paper whenever the professor arrives at the relevant conference. Id. at 20, 22.

246. Id. at 22. In sharing this observation, Julien does not comment on the previous scholarship’s many efforts to design pre-conference exercises that engage students in the revision process and combat their tendency to forget their drafting choices (e.g., Kearney and Beazley’s private memo).

247. Id. at 21.

248. Id.

249. Id. Julien’s point is a related but more detailed version of Wellford-Slocum’s criticism that a professor comments “in a vacuum.” See supra note 118 and accompanying text.

250. Id.

251. Id.

252. Id. at 24.

253. Id. at 23.

254. Id.

255. Id.

256. Id.

257. Id.

258. Id.

259. Id. Julien’s observation is well supported by previous research in other fields about the power of a writer hearing another person read their writing aloud. See, e.g., Judith Rosenbaum, Using Read-Aloud Protocols as a Method of Instruction, 7 Persps.: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 105, 105 (1999). In fact, in 1998, when legal writing professionals attended the Colloquium on Legal Discourse at Notre Dame University to meet with scholars of composition and other related fields, one influential topic was the read-aloud protocol, an exercise where students bring their drafts to class for a partner to read aloud, “verbalizing their mental impressions and thought processes as they are reading.” Id. The value of this exercise is that student-writers learn the “potential difficulties intended readers might have with the text as they stumble over the long sentences or say out loud, as part of the protocol, that they don’t understand what the writer means or that they haven’t been convinced by a particular analogy.” Id. As a result, the student-writers “experience readers other than themselves trying to make sense out of their drafts,” which in turn helps the student-writers rewrite their drafts. Id. Exercises like this are sometimes called “reader protocols” or “think-aloud protocols.” Id. at 105 n.3.

260. Julien, supra note 231, at 23.

261. Id. at 24.

262. Id.

263. Id.

264. Id.

265. Id.

266. Id. at 23.

267. Id. at 24. Julien notes that live critiquing may be easier when the professor has previously taught the assignment and is thus familiar with which portions students are most likely to struggle and need support. Id.

268. Id. at 25.

269. Id.

270. Id. at 24.

271. Davis et al., supra note 222.

272. Patricia Grande Montana, Live and Learn: Live Critiquing and Student Learning, 27 Persps.: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing (2019); Sholtis, supra note 229, at 6–12; DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 1–2. Amanda (Smith) Sholtis also cowrote an earlier and shorter article about live critiquing with her colleague at Widener University Commonwealth Law School. See Anna Hemingway & Amanda Smith, Best Practices in Legal Education: How Live Critiquing and Cooperative Work Lead to Happy Students and Happy Professors, 29 Second Draft 7 (2016).

273. Montana, supra note 272, at 22.

274. Id. at 23.

275. Sholtis, supra note 229, at 6–7.

276. DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 1–2, 2 n.4.

277. Montana, supra note 272, at 23; Sholtis, supra note 229, at 20–22; Julien, supra note 231, at 2–3.

278. Montana, supra note 272, at 23–24; Sholtis, supra note 229, at 20–22; Julien, supra note 231, at 2–3.

279. Montana, supra note 272, at 23–24; Sholtis, supra note 229, at 20–22; Julien, supra note 231, at 2–3.

280. DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 2–3. Montana gives students a completed rubric. Montana, supra note 272, at 23–24. Sholtis gives students a rubric and a recording of the live critique. Sholtis, supra note 229, at 17, 23.

281. Montana, supra note 272, at 23; Sholtis, supra note 229, at 20–22; DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 1.

282. Id. In fact, Sholtis urges professors not to make prereading part of their practice: “In-depth evaluation of papers beforehand, especially for experienced professors, is not necessary and can actually detract from the conference and make the conference appear rehearsed.” Sholtis, supra note 229, at 19; see also Thomas Newkirk, The First Five Minutes: Setting the Agenda in a Writing Conference, in Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research 317, 328 (Chris M. Anson ed. 1989) (asserting that in composition courses, “a marked-up paper indicates to the student that the agenda has already been set.”). Montana, however, acknowledges that skimming drafts or reading a sampling of drafts could be beneficial “if the professor is new to teaching or the assignment is an unfamiliar one.” Montana, supra note 272, at 23 n.9.

283. Montana, supra note 272, at 23–24; Sholtis, supra note 229, at 28, 35; Julien, supra note 231, at 2–3. DeJarnatt also describes the varying approaches her experienced colleagues have taken to live critiquing: Ellie Margolis skims drafts before conferring with students; Mark Wojcik grades the assignment during the live critique; Sarah Ricks and Ruth Anne Robbins use group conferences to facilitate peer feedback; Ellie Margolis and Kristen Murray require students to bring self-evaluations to the conference to focus the conversation. DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 4–5.

284. Sholtis, supra note 229, at 17. This tool includes questions like “What do you think the strengths of your paper are?” and “What did you struggle with most?” Id. As such, this tool parallels the pre-conference exercises that traditional conferencing scholars designed to encourage self-evaluation skills before the conference. See, e.g., Kearney & Beazley, supra note 5, at 897; Beazley, supra note 97, at 175–76; Brendel, supra note 99, at 124–25; Tully, supra note 209, at 10, 12.

285. DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 2–3.

286. Id. at 2.

287. Id.

288. Id. at 2–3.

289. Id. at 3. She also notes that she moved her live critiques to Zoom during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Id. at 4. She would use Zoom’s share screen feature to read the draft with the student and Word’s track changes feature to edit the draft with the student. Id. She reflects that she “do[es] not love Zoom,” but “the technique worked,” so even when in-person schooling returned, she continued offering her students the option of live critiquing via Zoom. Id. And she adds that a benefit of that option is that it can record the live critique and then students can revisit the recording later. Id.

290. See supra notes 95–96 and accompanying text. Neither DeJarnatt nor the live critiquing scholars that preceded her address why a first-year student is able to simultaneously grapple with writer-based and reader-based considerations in a live critique when the previous theory was that students needed to first deal with writer-based concerns and then progress to reader-based concerns.

291. Montana, supra note 272, at 24–26; Sholtis, supra note 229, at 7, 10, 15; DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 5–7.

292. Montana, supra note 272, at 24.

293. Id.

294. Id. Similarly, Sholtis shares that another aspect she appreciates about this method is when a “student reacts and articulates what [she] was going to say before [she] ha[s] a chance to say it.” Sholtis, supra note 229, at 21. This is gratifying for her because it shows that “the student sees the work from the reader’s perspective and recognizes how to improve it.” Id.

295. DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 4.

296. Id.

297. Id.

298. Id.

299. Id. at 3.

300. Montana, supra note 272, at 26.

301. Id. at 25.

302. Id. at 26.

303. Id. at 25.

304. Id. at 26.

305. DeJarnatt, supra note 226, at 2.

306. Id. at 5.

307. Id.

308. Id.

309. Id.

310. Id. at 5–6.

311. Id. at 6.

312. Id.

313. Id.

314. One example of a “right” intellectual struggle would be a student debating which case better illustrates their synthesized rule and thus should lead their discussion of the law. But it would not be productive for a student to struggle to reread their notes about out-of-jurisdiction cases in response to their professor’s comment about bolstering their analysis with a binding and more analogous case.

315. In addition to the rise of GenAI, other potential catalysts for significant change that professors are simultaneously contemplating include preparing students to take early iterations of the NextGen Bar; increasing or decreasing class sizes with changing funding streams to higher education as well as changing immigration policies and practices targeting foreign students; and new interdisciplinary research on waning attention spans for students. See About the NextGen Bar Exam, Nat’l Council of Bar Exam’rs, https://www.ncbex.org/exams/nextgen/about-nextgen [https://perma.cc/22A4-HDUD] (last visited Jan 30, 2026); Adrienne Lu, Trump-Inflicted Funding Cuts Could Lead to Overworked Faculty and Staff, Larger Class Sizes, The Chronicle of Higher Educ. (Mar. 25, 2025), https://www.chronicle.com/article/trump-inflicted-funding-cuts-could-lead-to-overworked-faculty-and-staff-larger-class-sizes; Robert Barba, Student-Visa Applicants Must Set Social-Media Accounts to ‘Public,’ State Department Says, The Wall St. J. (June 18, 2025), https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/student-visa-applicants-must-set-social-media-accounts-to-public-state-department-says-ff71bdd5?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1; Gloria Mark, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity (2023).

316. Indeed, a professor may choose in one year to use a live critique for the first assignment in the fall semester and a traditional conference for the last assignment in the spring semester and then reverse that order for the following year.

317. A note of encouragement to not resuscitate the stigma against live critiquing here. An individual professor’s perceived rate of exertion during commenting versus during conferencing may differ: Some professors may view commenting as more efficient (e.g., they can complete the task asynchronously, they have established systems that save them time like a standard set of comments that they can copy, paste, and quickly alter to fit each student’s draft, etc.). Some professors may view commenting as less burdensome (e.g., they lose patience repeating the same points in thirty-plus slightly different conversations, or they find it taxing to share space with students who are stressed, unappreciative, hostile, persistent, and so on).

318. See, e.g., Hua Hsu, What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?, The New Yorker (June 30, 2025), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/the-end-of-the-english-paper (a professor at a liberal arts college shares anecdotes from interviews with undergraduates and professors at elite universities about how they are using and responding to GenAI; experiences range from using GenAI “just” to proofread to relying on it to write entire papers, and from professors not policing it whatsoever to creating layers of deterrents, such as requiring in-class, handwritten essay exams); Piers Gelly, What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom, Literary Hub (July 28, 2025), https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-myself-with-chatgpt-in-my-english-classroom [https://perma.cc/XF8X-ZJL3] (explaining how an English professor at the University of Virginia engaged his students in an experiment of sorts: “Rather than taking an ‘abstinence-only’ approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.”).

319. Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI 52 (2024). A “human in the loop” is a person with enough working knowledge of AI to be able to oversee it effectively, while also offering their own critical thinking skills, ethical considerations, and subject-matter expertise. Id.

320. Carolyn V. Williams, Bracing for Impact: Revising Legal Writing Assessments Ahead of the Collision of Generative AI and the NextGen Bar Exam, 28 Legal Writing 1 (2024) (“[I]f GenAI is the true author of the student’s work” and the professor uses “written work product as the sole basis for assessing a student’s skills,” then “GenAI has the potential to hide students’ lack of skills.”); Kirsten K. Davis, A New Parlor Is Open: Legal Writing Faculty Must Develop Scholarship on Generative AI and Legal Writing, 7 Stetson L. Rev. Forum 1, 20 (2024). (“If generative AI can write for students, a question arises as to whether the ‘traditional’ out-of-class legal writing assessment can still be counted as a reliable, authentic indicator of a student’s capabilities in legal writing.”).

321. See supra notes 26–28, 61–63, 85–91, 94–96, 102–109, 140–142 and accompanying text.

322. Wellford-Slocum, supra note 113.

323. Id.

324. See supra notes 52–54, 69–74, 97–107, 145, 180–190, 196–200, 209–216 and accompanying text.

325. See supra notes 55–59, 75–78, 97–107, 196–200, 291 and accompanying text.