Summary, Judgment

How to Become a Legal Writing Professor

Guest Post

Guest Post by Rachel Gurvich, UNC School of Law, and Beth Wilensky, University of Michigan Law School.

A few weeks ago, this blog published a series of posts framed as advice for folks hoping to become law professors. Will and Adam described what aspiring law professors should do during and after law school and offered specific advice about how to develop scholarly ideas.   

But this advice was directed only to a particular kind of law professor, as Will acknowledged in a follow-up post. Will’s colleague at Chicago, Professor Claudia Flores, has since written a post with advice for students interested in eventually obtaining a teaching position in a law school clinic.

We now offer advice for students hoping to teach legal research and writing (LRW). While our advice includes some tips for what to do during law school, the good news is that even if you don’t decide until after law school that you’re interested in making the transition, that won’t be a barrier to entry. And conversely, our during-law-school advice will help you have a great law school experience even if you later decide you don’t want to pursue this path.

Before we get to the advice, however, we should be transparent about what law schools look for when hiring LRW faculty. Both of us have served on hiring committees tasked with such searches, so we’re well positioned to provide some insight. And if you’re interested in reading more about the hiring process itself, we’d refer you to this article by UNC Professor Peter Nemerovski, an empirical study about the qualities law schools are looking for and who they hire, and this essay by BU Professor Cody Jacobs, which describes his recent experience on the market and offers specific advice about how to navigate the hiring process.

Much of the advice that Will and Adam originally offered boils down to convincing law school hiring committees that you will be a great scholar. But when law schools seek to add a new full-time LRW professor, the two most important considerations are (1) practice experience and (2) potential for excellence in teaching. Accordingly, much of our advice will help put you on a path towards making the most of your time in law practice and finding opportunities to become familiar with—and practice—good pedagogy. Here are some suggestions for what you can do both during and after law school.

While in Law School

First, if you’re not at a “T14” law school, don’t panic, and definitely don’t give up before you’ve even begun. Yes, it’s true that, because the legal academy tends to be elitist, having certain names on your diploma can make your path easier, especially if you’re pursuing a job as the kind of professor that Professors Baude and Chilton had in mind. But there is a path to any academic job from schools outside the “T14,” and for LRW positions, it is much less of an uphill climb.  

Relatedly, don’t panic if your grades aren’t what you imagine they should be. Just as grades do not determine whether you will be a good lawyer, they also do not determine whether you will be a good experiential law professor. And professors like the ones writing this post will be willing to mentor and support your academic aspirations regardless of your grades.

Many students who go on to be experiential faculty do an outstanding job in LRW even though their grades in non-experiential classes aren’t as strong. And even students who struggle in LRW can end up being terrific professors. In fact, students who struggle initially, but put in a lot of effort (not just as a 1L, but in law school and practice generally) and who, as a result, develop into outstanding writers are often the people who make the best LRW professors. They can credibly tell students that effort in legal writing pays off, and they often have the best sense of how to help students for whom legal analysis and writing doesn’t come naturally.

To the extent you want to start thinking about setting yourself up for an LRW position while you’re in law school, there some things you might want to do.

First, hone your own skills. These are the skills you will use in practice and the skills you will ultimately teach. Look for summer positions where you’ll have the opportunity to do research, writing, and advocacy, but remember that the transferrable skills you learn in these positions are actually more important than the area of law in which you practice them. Take upper-level writing classes where you write practical legal documents and receive regular feedback on your work. Consider moot court if you’re interested in appellate practice and oral advocacy. Take a clinic where you get to research and write. (We tend to think all law students should take a clinic, regardless of their career aspirations, but that’s a different blog post.) And dive into campus organizations and pro bono opportunities that will let you continue to hone your research, writing, and oral communication skills.

Second, pay attention to the pedagogy of good LRW professors. Effective teaching should be every law professor’s primary objective. Though teaching potential is often given short shrift in hiring on the non-experiential side, it’s an essential consideration in LRW hiring. The good news is that teaching, like nearly any skill, is something that anyone can learn to do well with the right resources, sustained effort, reflection, and a bit of humility.

Experiential pedagogy is based on the core assumptions that (1) legal analysis, legal writing, client representation, and effective advocacy are all skills that can be taught; and (2) the way in which these are taught matters. LRW professors use flipped classrooms, the workshop model, and frequent formative assessments. They are trained to tailor their instruction to the needs of individual learners, teach skills as well as concepts, deliver content and personalized feedback in ways that are thorough and accessible, and cultivate a rigorous but supportive learning environment. LRW professors teach in an intentional, labor-intensive way, with predictable methods that draw from cognitive science and a rich literature of pedagogy and best practices. If you learn these methods, you will be a better teacher.

But these methods aren’t used in all law school classes. And even when they are, sometimes they aren’t transparent to students. As a result, one of the most challenging things for lawyers to do when they try to transition from practice to an LRW faculty position is to wrap their heads around teaching, and all of the ways that teaching is different than supervising junior attorneys while practicing law. So while you are a student, watch what your most effective professors do. Reflect on how you learn best and what your professors have done to foster that learning. Pay attention to specific methods they use and think about why they do (or don’t) enhance your understanding or retention of the material. 

If your school has a program in which upper-level students work with students in 1L LRW classes, that’s a great way to get a window into LRW pedagogy, and you should apply. The title and responsibilities of such teaching fellows will vary from school to school, but regardless, you will almost certainly have a good experience working with 1Ls as they learn legal analysis, research, writing, and citation, and you will enjoy the opportunity to do the next thing on our list. 

Third, get to know your professors, especially LRW faculty. Ask for and listen to their stories about how they ended up in their current positions. (Spoiler alert: these stories will vary widely.) Honestly, it’s hard to think of a career for which getting to know at least some of your professors isn’t valuable. That doesn’t mean you need to get to know all of them, but pick a few who (1) can speak highly of you and your work and (2) who do something you find interesting and want to learn more about. And it’s fine if those are different people.

Fourth, look to expand your network beyond just your law school. One way to do this is by participating in certain national student organizations. But another, sometimes easier, way to do it is by finding an online community—Twitter in particular. (Check out the hashtags #LRWProf and #LRWProfs to find discussions among and relevant to LRW faculty.) Follow and engage with LRW professors, legal writing experts, and practicing attorneys who care deeply about legal writing. If you listen carefully to and then gradually join the conversation, you will have a meaningful network you can tap as a resource, a richer substantive knowledge of legal writing best practices, and a better understanding of the role you’re trying to step into. (This is something you should keep up when you go into practice.)   

Finally, consider pursuing a clerkship, a process that may—or may not!—start during law school. A clerkship is not essential for securing an LRW position, but many LRW professors have clerked. A clerkship is a great way to pack a lot of intense research and writing practice into a short period of time, often with an excellent supervisor. And it will help you explain to students how courts work while giving you a close-up look at effective (and ineffective) oral and written advocacy. It doesn’t matter whether the clerkship is district or appellate, state or federal; all are excellent opportunities for this purpose and more generally.

After Law School

 You’ve graduated and passed the bar. Congratulations! Now what? Practice law! Significant practice experience is the most important qualification you can bring to an LRW teaching position—ideally at least 5 years of practice, though some schools will consider candidates with less. Many kinds of practice experience can make you attractive to hiring committees: private practice (big or small law), government, public interest, criminal, and more. Because the 1L LRW course at most schools skews towards litigation, most LRW professors have practice experience in some sort of litigation. But many schools offer upper-level courses in transactional drafting, so if you are able to gain experience in litigation and transactional work, you might be a particularly attractive candidate on the teaching market.

 How should you use your time in practice to position yourself for a transition to academia? Here are a few steps you can take:

 First, learn what distinguishes effective from ineffective supervisors, and learn how to be an effective one. Develop the ability to give meaningful feedback. As a junior attorney, reflect regularly on what you find helpful when you receive feedback. If your organization hires law student interns, volunteer to supervise them or invite them to work with you. And when you have the opportunity to supervise other attorneys or student interns, take it upon yourself to not just correct their work, but to help them develop into outstanding writers and attorneys.

Next, reach out to local law schools to volunteer your time—as a moot court judge, mock trial coach, mock interviewer, guest speaker in an LRW class, panelist at a career information session, alumni advisor, etc. Try to get to know the professors who teach in these schools’ LRW programs (and the directors of such programs, if they have directors), and express your interest in teaching LRW. That way, you’ll be on their radar when opportunities arise.   

If those nearby law schools offer opportunities to teach as an adjunct, seek them out. Ideally, you’d want to teach an LRW class, but most law schools have moved away from adjunct programs in favor of hiring full-time faculty to teach legal writing. But even schools that have full-time faculty teaching LRW occasionally need a visitor to fill in for a year, which is another good reason to develop relationships with the faculty at nearby law schools. To the extent they exist, adjunct and visiting programs can offer good opportunities to get your feet wet and confirm that you really enjoy teaching. Working as an adjunct also lets you put pedagogy into practice and demonstrates your commitment to teaching. If you aren’t able to teach a legal writing class as an adjunct, seek out opportunities to teach other classes in your area of expertise on an adjunct basis.

If you do get an adjunct or visiting position, make sure you speak with experienced LRW faculty before you start teaching. By the time you have enough practice experience under your belt to be an effective adjunct, you’re often far removed from the law school—and especially the 1L—experience. Professor Sherri Lee Keene of Georgetown wrote a helpful article geared towards practicing attorneys transitioning to teaching 1L LRW; we recommend it.

Immerse yourself in scholarship. LRW faculty have developed a robust pedagogy around what we do in and out of the classroom. Spend time reading scholarship both about what makes for outstanding legal analysis, writing, and research and also about how to teach law students to develop their skills in those areas. Here are some good sources to spend time with:

If you’re feeling ambitious, and your circumstances permit, you might write something for publication yourself. Very few programs expect LRW candidates to have already published in the field, but some require LRW faculty to produce scholarship to be eligible for retention or promotion. Some law schools support LRW scholarship but don’t require it. Other places do neither. Certainly, if you can write and publish some things that would appeal to an LRW program, that can make you a more attractive candidate. It shows a genuine interest in what we do and initiative in thinking about how we do it.

A few law schools offer fellowship or formal visitor programs to help practitioners transition to the teaching market. These temporary (usually 1-3 year) positions are well established at many law schools for non-experiential and clinical hiring, but are relatively rare in the LRW field. And they usually require the ability to pick up and move for the fellowship, which is often low-paying, before moving again to a permanent position once the fellowship ends. Still, if you can get one, they are a great way to gain a foothold in the market for LRW faculty. Schools that have recently posted LRW fellowship or formal visitor positions include the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law, and Elon University School of Law.[1]

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that, at most schools, legal writing faculty enjoy lower status and fewer benefits than non-experiential faculty (in terms of things like job security, salary, research money, participation in faculty governance, eligibility for sabbaticals, etc.). But if your heart is in teaching legal analysis, writing, and research—as ours are—the rewards are immense. And as LRW professors who are eager to welcome new faculty to the field, we are happy to help you get started. Email us!

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[1] Don’t be confused by the multitude of opportunities that show up if you Google things like “legal writing fellowship.” Aside from schools that call their 2L and 3L teaching assistants “legal writing fellows,” your search results will mostly include programs like the Climenko fellowship at Harvard and the Bigelow fellowship at the University of Chicago, where fellows engage in scholarship to prepare for the ­non­-experiential teaching market while also teaching legal writing on the side.