The University of Tulsa College of Law has launched an innovative pilot program aimed at integrating legal writing, legal research, and doctrinal subjects into a cohesive first-year curriculum.
“A unique aspect of the program is the interdisciplinary approach. It’s not just legal writing with legal research. This is legal writing with legal research, with civil procedure, with contracts, with torts – and professors from all disciplines are participating,” said Lori Twomey, director of legal writing.
Twomey said the program started during the fall 2024 semester and the goal was to show first-year law students how substantive law and legal skills work together.
“As an outgrowth of what started as ad hoc collaboration with Professor Gwendolyn Savitz, we envisioned working with the Mabee Legal Information Center on a research component,” Twomey said. “We spent last spring brainstorming how to accomplish our goals and what the best format was, and we decided to offer Introduction to Legal Research as an additional one credit-hour course early in the students’ first semester.”
The students meet multiple times for the first five weeks of the semester. It works like this: The final project from the legal research course is taken into the legal writing class, and students are asked to draft a hypothetical research email to a faux law partner. This semester, the “quick turnaround” research email had a civil procedure aspect that was relevant to their civil procedure class.
“For example, Professor Savitz was working on an assignment in civil procedure about how to differentiate between a question of law and a question of fact,” Twomey said. “The email we wrote involved taking the research assignment from the legal research class and determining whether the hypothetical client’s issue would be a question of fact or a question of law. Students then had to integrate the findings from the research class into that email for the legal writing class, which was an application of coursework they had been exploring in their civil procedure class.”
Once they completed the email, the students received additional procedural context, such as a pleading had been filed and they now needed to substantively evaluate the affirmative defenses and determine whether a motion for summary judgment would be appropriate.
“They did additional research, which brought in law they had been learning in their contracts class, and also law they had been learning in their torts class,” Twomey said. Students were then asked to put together their substantive knowledge and skills to draft a formal predictive memo.
“You cannot be a lawyer without knowing how to write and how to research,” she said. “I mean it is the foundational skill.”
She added that legal writing is more than simply writing.
“It’s not just good grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure,” she said. “It’s critical thinking. It’s putting the puzzle together to create a case strategy. It’s thinking like a lawyer and then communicating like a lawyer.”
Twomey said law faculty and staff will gather in summer 2025 to fine-tune the program for future students.
“The pilot went very well, so we definitely plan to continue it,” she said. “Over the summer, we’ll look at the entire year, which would be two semesters with our newest students, and we’ll say, ‘What worked? What didn’t work? What can we do to make it better?’”
This pilot program is one of many innovations in teaching and curriculum strategically designed to position law students to be practice-ready upon graduation. Learn more about the latest happenings in UTulsa’s College of Law at https://utulsa.edu/archive/law/.