Legal Writing Program: Northern Kentucky University, Greater Cincinnati Region

Group of Chase Law students walking outdoors at NKU.

The Legal Writing Program at Chase Law

Legal Writing at Chase offers a cohesive student experience for all three or four years of law school. Chase legal writing program is led by a Director who oversees a mix of tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct faculty with decades of experience both in the classroom and in the courtroom. This approach allows all program professors access to similar textbooks, brief problems, rubrics, and lecture materials using Canvas, NKU’s learning management system.

Legal Writing faculty come from a variety of different backgrounds, including corporate law, criminal law, and litigation, and they contribute significantly to the academy with their diverse research agendas. Program professors meet together throughout each term and are in regular contact to share resources and collaborate on editing course materials; this collaborative approach allows for a challenging and cohesive student experience. The Legal Writing Director, Professor Marcy Ziegler, is actively involved in national organizations like LWI, ALWD, and AALS, and sources class resources from colleagues in all three organizations. Multiple professors write and teach Continuing Legal Education materials on legal writing subjects, including for the Kentucky Bench and Bar magazine, for legal writing journals, and for law reviews across the country.

The Legal Writing program is also dedicated to increasing the quality of instruction for every student, including an emphasis on wellness and professional identity. The Director routinely attends conferences to learn about strategies to assist with student wellness, has developed course lectures on the subject, and presents the resources she has created at national conferences. Chase has also added more wellness and professional identity material to orientation (called Legal Analysis and Problem Solving -LAPS) and to individual Basic Legal Skills classes, which will continue to be expanded in the coming semesters.  These latest efforts are consistent with and support the long-standing efforts of the law school’s Director of Student Affairs, Ashley Siemer, who has led student wellness efforts for many years. This focus on not only a student’s success in writing but on their mental wellness sets Chase apart, and provides for a well-rounded, positive experience here at NKU.

Program Requirements

Our first-year students complete two semesters of Basic Legal Skills–Writing; the first semester typically includes a closed memo, and the second semester includes an open appellate brief along with a collaboratively-managed oral argument judged by multiple professors.   Both semesters involve practice with rule synthesis, critical legal analysis, and professional grammar and organization. Students in the program will learn to master proper legal citation, use of appellate court rules, and IRAC-style organization over their first year.

The Legal Writing program faculty also collaborates with Legal Research and skills professors. Our Director and three full-time staff professors teach our year-long Legal Methods course and our week-long orientation, Legal Analysis and Problem Solving (LAPS). In the 2024-25 year, both programs were completely redeveloped based on student needs and outcomes with input from skills and doctrinal professors; the courses are also updated on a yearly basis to address the academic needs of our growing student body. Notably, the LAPS course utilizes a mock NextGen bar exam to prepare our students for bar passage before classes even start. The faculty also works with our law librarians to make the BLS and Legal Research courses more unified, as the BLS-Research exercises are based on our pre-selected legal writing problems.

Chase students are also required to complete two kinds of upper-level writing projects: one in research (AWR-R) and one in drafting (AWR-D). These classes have specific requirements for length and rigor for their writing projects, which are typically completed in conjunction with an upper-level seminar course. The program also develops new upper-level courses regularly. For example, in the past two years, we have added a seminar course on Serial Killers and High-Profile cases (both AWR-R and AWR-D) and one on Advanced Writing for Advocacy (AWR-R only). Legal writing professors also supervise students for independent research projects for AWR credit, as well as for law review notes.

The Virtual Writing Center

In December 2023, Chase’s writing program launched its Virtual Writing Center. Students are automatically enrolled in the center, which is set up as a Canvas shell, as they matriculate. The Canvas shell allows students to access a vast array of writing resources, like brief and memo samples, pleadings, power points and video tutorials. The Center also uses discussion boards to pair upperclassmen with 1L students, providing editing assistance on cover letters and writing samples. In the first 18 months the center operated, over 400 students accessed it, representing nearly the entire student body at the time.

The Center continues to add resources; a recent project involves curating sample questions and answers from doctrinal professors to serve as examples for students preparing for final exams. The Legal Writing Director has also presented on the Center at an LWI conference and assisted several outside professors in creating their own centers across the country.

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