• Email
• Name
• Place of employment
• Years of teaching or practice experience
• Name(s) of co-presenter(s), if any
• Title of proposed presentation
• Desired length of presentation, 25 or 50 minutes
• Brief description of proposed presentation, under 100 words
• First, second, and third choice of host school
• Whether you are willing to serve as a mentor
• Whether you would like to be assigned a mentor
• Additional comments for organizers

Across the country, educators are navigating increasingly complex teaching environments marked by political polarization, legislative restrictions, and heightened scrutiny of content related to equity, identity, and social issues. At the same time, students bring lived experiences shaped by inequity, identity, and social conflict.

This one-day workshop equips instructors with practical, research-supported strategies for teaching politically charged topics and concepts connected to equity and social understanding, while centering the role of language as power and the importance of justice-oriented pedagogy.

Participants will explore how language shapes authority, belonging, and interpretation; how word choice can either open or close intellectual space; and how to teach justice-focused themes responsibly in environments where such work may be contested or constrained. The workshop emphasizes pedagogical courage, professional safety, and ethical clarity.

Generative AI is reshaping how lawyers research, analyze, and communicate. It is also raising important questions about how legal educators should teach lawyering skills and how they can authentically assess students' proficiency in those skills.

This conference seeks practical presentations on what educators are trying, what has worked, what has not worked as intended, and what they plan to test next.

Potential topics include oral assessments, AI-integrated and AI-restricted assignments, closed-book or closed-internet exams, time-pressured research and writing assignments, simulated lawyering tasks, new approaches to the writing sample, incremental adaptations of familiar assessment methods, and other innovative methods of assessing legal analysis, communication, advocacy, judgment, and related lawyering competencies. Presenters are encouraged to share assignments, rubrics, examples, anecdotes, lessons learned, and emerging best practices.

How do we meaningfully bring social justice into legal writing education? This interactive workshop invites legal writing educators to share one “best thing” — a method, assignment, classroom activity, teaching tip, or practical strategy that has helped make their teaching, programs, and classrooms more inclusive.

Presentations may address ways to integrate social justice themes into legal writing instruction, frame language as a form of power, or help students recognize how law affects communities differently. Speakers might share an effective course, lesson, discussion prompt, writing exercise, assessment, or approach to teaching difficult issues.

Presentations may also focus on creating supportive and diverse classroom environments, fostering respectful dialogue, incorporating varied perspectives, or helping students develop the skills and confidence to engage across difference.

The workshop also welcomes a professor- and program-oriented lens, including mentoring, faculty collaboration, program policies, curriculum development, or efforts to support instructor well-being and belonging.

Each presentation should offer a concrete idea that participants can adapt to their own courses or programs. Together, we will build a shared collection of practical strategies for advancing inclusion, equity, and justice in legal writing education.

Legal writing curricula have developed over decades, shaped by pedagogical commitments, institutional structures, professional expectations, and tradition. But what if we could start over? This workshop invites presenters to imagine how they would design legal writing education today if they were not constrained by what or how we have historically taught.

Proposals might examine the skills we teach, traditional assignments and assessments, course structure, generative AI, accessibility, changing student populations, new teaching modalities, developments in legal practice, or other forces reshaping legal education. The goal is not change for change’s sake, but to distinguish choices grounded in current pedagogical and professional needs from those retained primarily because they are familiar.

The workshop will also reserve space for a small works-in-progress session. Proposals for developing projects related or unrelated to the workshop theme are welcome at any stage, from an early idea or developing argument to a partial or complete draft. Presenters will receive focused feedback in a collegial setting.

This workshop will explore opportunities for making progress on legal writing status issues, including job security, voting rights, salary and compensation, and workload issues.

It will provide updates on the LWI Professional Status Committee’s national advocacy, including advocacy to the ABA and other groups given current threats to the ABA’s status as the primary accreditor of law schools.

The workshop will also explore school-specific efforts and how the Professional Status Committee can support those efforts, as well as presentations by non-committee members about their own status-related issues, efforts, and successes. The goal is to provide actionable information and tools while strengthening the community of legal writing faculty navigating these challenges.

Legal writing students today have access to more tools and resources than ever before. While it is essential that students understand how to best use these tools, the growing emphasis on technology can sometimes eclipse the central goal of legal education — preparing students for the practice of law.

This workshop invites legal writing professors and professionals to examine how teaching and engagement can best prepare students for legal writing assignments and what lies beyond the classroom, including the new bar examination and the demands of practice.

Proposals that go beyond theory to offer innovative ideas, classroom techniques, and teaching tools demonstrating specific, replicable methods for helping students succeed in class, on the bar exam, and in practice are particularly encouraged.

The NextGen Bar Exam shifts the emphasis from doctrinal recall to applied lawyering, including client counseling, drafting, issue spotting, and practical judgment. This workshop asks how legal writing and skills faculty can design creative, hands-on classroom activities and simulations that build those competencies directly.

Presenters will share and workshop exercises, simulations, and assessment tools that put students in client-facing, decision-making postures, including counseling role plays, drafting under realistic constraints, and issue-analysis exercises modeled on NextGen task types.

Attendees will leave with adaptable classroom materials, a shared vocabulary for discussing skills-based learning across institutions, and an opportunity to workshop emerging ideas with colleagues facing similar curricular pressures.

This virtual workshop aims to encourage legal writing professors to read and engage with existing scholarship in the discipline as a means of energizing their own research agendas.

The workshop will begin with presentations on how reading scholarship can help develop ideas, motivate scholars to begin projects, or provide momentum to complete research and writing. Breakout sessions will then use a book-club format centered on preselected articles by legal writing professors.

Additional presentations will provide specific guidance for effectively engaging with scholarship as a means of advancing one's own work toward publication. The workshop is designed both to jumpstart new scholars and to re-energize experienced scholars in the discipline.

This workshop will focus on strengthening legal writing as an academic discipline through scholarship.

Proposals on scholarship are welcome, including presentations addressing research methodology, writing and editing, organizing research and drafts, works in progress, and recently completed articles.

The workshop will address pedagogy specific to clerkship and judicial writing classes, as well as advice about writing clerkship letters of recommendation.

This workshop will explore how language is used in law and why recognizing the power behind language matters to legal analysis and advocacy.

The discussion is intended to examine the ethical dimensions and tensions of zealous advocacy, including how loaded language can advance arguments and how unnoticed language choices can hinder advocacy.

Presentations may consider how professors can help students recognize where bias can enter legal decision making and develop strategies for looking beyond the surface of legal opinions and their own writing so that they can become better advocates.

Legal writing faculty are often on the frontlines of promoting well-being for their students while also navigating challenges within their institutions and the academy. The Well-Being Committee invites presenters, panelists, and discussants to share challenges and best practices for promoting well-being within and outside the classroom for both students and faculty.

This workshop will address teaching approaches that enhance student engagement in an age defined by isolation and distraction. Presentations will focus on how legal writing professors have leveraged creative teaching tools to cultivate student buy-in and promote student connection and engagement in the first-year legal writing classroom.