Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm taking another look at legal education's transition online and assessing whether professors have been ambitious enough in their approach to teaching digitally, with insights from John Mayer, executive director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Education. What can educators learn from this past semester to improve if distance legal education remains in place in the fall? Plus, the deal-making competition for law students, LawMeets, is moving online this summer to help fill the skills gap left by canceled summer associate programs and internships. Read on and stay safe!

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

Legal Ed's Online Grade

In last week's briefing, I wrote that the law professors and administrators I've spoken with over the past month have said the shift to online teaching has been relatively smooth. I wanted to get a second opinion on that assessment, so I rang up John Mayer, the executive director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction—better known as CALI. For more than 30 years, Mayer and CALI have been advocating for learning the law via computer resources, and the nonprofit organization has compiled more than 1,000 interactive online legal lessons. (The group is also an enthusiastic supporter of open-sourced, online casebooks.) All of which is to say that if anyone could offer me a clear-eyed assessment of legal education's pivot online, it's Mayer. So I asked him to grade law schools on their performance this semester. His verdict? B-/C+. I'll let him explain:

"The B- is because 8,000 or so law faculty did it. They went home and they got online. They had to, but the amount of grumbling I heard was pretty minor. People bucked up. I'm proud of the ed tech folks who scrambled to support them."

The C-, however, is for the lack of imagination law faculty have generally employed in translating their courses into distance education. Most law faculty have approached the problem by recreating their classroom teaching on Zoom or whatever conferencing platform they are using, instead of rethinking their approach to teaching and incorporating existing computer resources into their courses, Mayer noted. A big part of that is the emergency nature of the move online—faculty didn't have much time to consider how best to teach under the new circumstances. But they are also, in general, unfamiliar with the existing tools out there, be it CALI's lessons or other resources from legal vendors such as Hotshot, which has a database of videos, quizzes and exercises designed to teach the law.

Getting the legal academy to think more ambitiously about how to teach online is one goal of CALIcon2020—the group's annual conference, now in its 30th year, will be held virtually for the first time June 3-5. It's free to all registrants, a change Mayer hopes will boost attendance from the typical 200 to 300 people, to anywhere from 500 to 1,000, even if all attendees don't watch each of the nine sessions. CALI has called for proposals on topics related to the intersection of legal education, the pandemic and technology. Those selected will put together 15-minute presentations on their topic, which will eventually be packaged with two others for hour-long conference sessions followed by a 15-minute Q&A. (Mayer said the idea is to keep things fast-paced, as well as spread out over three days so attendees don't get bored or distracted.) It was a no-brainer to retool the focus of the conference in light of COVID-19 disruption of the status quo, Mayer told me.

"It would be silly to day, 'Oh, let's talk about the stuff we always talk about,' when we have this 900-million pound gorilla in the room called coronavirus," he said.

The goal of the conference is twofold: First, CALI hopes to capture this extraordinary moment in time and create some sort of a record of how, with days or only weeks' notice, all of legal education left the classroom and relocated online. Perhaps more importantly, the group wants to prompt legal educators to better understand the computer teaching resources out there and consider how to provide improved online legal education should restrictions on in-person teaching remain. Another way to think about it is that law schools can use the summer break to think through how to do more than simply deliver a lecture on zoom. Asynchronous teaching can be very effective, but it also requires more planning and forethought than talking into a laptop, Mayer noted.

One of the big question marks looming over higher education at the moment is whether or not campuses can reopen safely in the fall—several major universities have announced that they might remain online for the fall semester. And now is the time to think through how best to approach teaching if it can't happen in the classroom, according to Mayer.

"Either fall is going to entirely online—and I think we're at a 50/50 chance that will happen—or some portion of classes will be online in the fall," he said. "There's a good chance all the small classes will get to meet—say 15 people and under. But anything 25, 30 and over, if you can't entirely eliminate group meetings you can at least minimize it by having the big lectures done through remote means."

Even if the threat of COVID-19 dissipates quickly, online learning will forever be a bigger aspect of legal education, Mayer said. Students and faculty have seen what's possible, and there's no going back.

Speaking of Online…

One of the great things about having this weekly briefing is that I have a place to plug worthy initiatives, so I'm using this space to highlight the upcoming virtual summer offering from LawMeets. (This is the type of online learning resource that Mayer wants to see legal educators embrace.) For those unfamiliar, LawMeets is an M&A deal-making competition for law students that Drexel law professor Karl Okamoto created more than 10 years ago to help teach students deal-making skills. The competition puts law students into teams to hammer out some sort of business deal, from drafting, marking up, then negotiating a business deal. The teams are judged, in rounds, by M&A law firm partners. There obviously aren't any in-person competitions happening this semester, but Okamoto reached out to me last week to tell me about the virtual program LawMeets is rolling out this summer.

In a nutshell, law students form teams of two find a coach—an experienced M&A lawyer or law professor who teaches in that area—then complete eight weeks of M&A exercises. The exercises are broken down into four different modules, each composed of a simulated business deal. Each module culminates in teams negotiating with one another, while receiving feedback from judges. The top-performing teams will be invited to participate in the finals, which is a series of elimination rounds held over two weeks.

I've attended several LawMeets competitions over the years, and they really are impressive. The students take it seriously, as do the lawyers who take time out of their busy schedules to judge the competition and offer feedback. I think moving the competition online this summer is smart. Between internships that have evaporated overnight due to COVID-19 and shortened or canceled summer associate programs, there will be plenty of law students with extra time on their hands over the next few months. This move can't recreate the experience of summering with a firm, but it offers students a chance to build some transactional skills. And Okamoto told me he would welcome summer associates if firms themselves want to field teams.

Here are the details:

➤➤The program runs from May 30-August 7.

➤➤The cost per team is $100

➤➤LawMeets can't offer credit for the competition, but students should contact their schools to ask about that possibility.

➤➤Sullivan & Cromwell is sponsoring the competition, and Okamoto is seeking additional firm sponsors. Lawyers can sign up to be judges here.

➤➤Participants can sign up for the competition here by May 15.

Extra Credit Reading

The National Conference of Bar Examiners is making the case against emergency diploma privileges, arguing that skipping the bar exam puts the public at risk.

Will international students still flock to U.S. law schools next year? Or will they stay home because of the coronavirus? Schools are anxiously waiting to see.

A new report says economics may be dissuading Asian-Americans from pursing law school.

Suffolk University Law School is helping develop way to file court documents amid courthouse closures.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]