ALL-SIS Advanced Legal Research Workshop Coming to San Antonio

If you teach or plan to teach Advanced Legal Research, please join the ALL-SIS Legal Research Committee’s Advanced Legal Research Instructors Roundtable in San Antonio on Sunday, July 17, 2005, from 12:00pm - 1:15pm. Last year, we had over seventy participants eager to share their teaching experiences, discuss successes and challenges, and stimulate ideas for future creative and effective collaboration among instructors.

The format of the informal program will be small group discussions lead by a moderator. To stimulate dialogue, the committee has compiled the following list of talking points for participants’ consideration (the list will also be posted to the ALL-SIS web site):

Course Materials & Teaching Methods

1. Would you be willing to share your research exercises in the Legal Research Sourcebook? Why or Why not?
2. What are some effective ways of teaching small groups legal research without using PowerPoint?
3. Do you think that ALR instructors have a good grasp of what types of legal research practicing attorneys will need to perform? If not, how can they improve their understanding?
4. Is your course taught by one librarian or by a team of librarians? If taught by a team, how do you divide the duties?
5. What approach do you use for drafting class exercises and simulations? Do you use canned exercises or do you draft your own? If you draft your own, is there a particular method you use to come up with the questions?
6. Do you use a published textbook? If so, what is your choice of text? Why? If you are not happy with your textbook what would you like to see in a text?

Course Content

1. How much time do you spend in your advanced legal research course reviewing material the students should have learned as first years? For those who have to spend a significant amount of time reviewing first-year materials, who teaches your first-years legal research, librarians, writing instructors, or students?
2. What are the advantages/disadvantages of teaching topic-specific courses rather than survey courses? If you have taught a 1 credit or ‘compressed’ advanced legal research course, what has your experience been?
3. What role, if any, does non-law or interdisciplinary research instruction play in your advanced legal research course(s)? What approaches have you employed to introduce law students to research in other disciplines?
4. How important is it to include international legal research in advanced legal survey courses if no specific course in international law research is offered?

Electronic Research

1. How do you present the online legal research component of your cours(es)? For example, do you integrate print and electronic by topic, or do you separate your discussion by format? Do you discuss Internet research in the context of online research systems? Why/why not?
2. Do company vendors do your online training - alone or in conjunction with the Librarians? Would you consider asking law firm librarians to participate in the training? What advantages and/or drawbacks have you experienced with your current approach(s)?
3. How you incorporated blogs, newsfeeds, or aggregators into your courses? If so, what have you done, and what results have you seen?
4. Do you make a point to cover government and other high quality free sites that offer useful sources of electronic legal information?
5. What kinds of electronic databases, services, products do you cover other than Lexis or Westlaw?

Evaluation

1. How do you evaluate your students?
2. What kind of tests, quizzes, etc. do you require?
3. What kind of student work projects do you require?

The moderator in each group will take notes of the proceedings, which will form the basis of a follow-up report.

We hope you will join us for this unique opportunity for peer-to-peer discussion and brainstorming. If you have questions or ideas or would like to help at the Roundtable, please contact me at wescott@law.syr.edu or Jennifer Murray at MurrayJ@gtlaw.com.