“Adapting Memo and Motion Assessments for GenAI and the NextGen Bar”

Professor Williams presents at the Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference.

The NextGen Bar Exam signals a fundamental shift in how legal writing and research skills are assessed, focusing less on drafting documents from scratch and more on revising and enhancing existing text. Similarly, effective use of Generative AI requires a critical eye for evaluating and improving first drafts. To align with these changes, legal writing assessments should evolve to mirror these real-world and exam-focused skills.

In her presentation, Professor Williams shared how she redesigned her fall closed memo assignment to emphasize revision over original drafting. The revised assignment asks students to critically analyze, refine, and provide feedback on a draft, developing the skills necessary for both the NextGen Bar and practical GenAI use. Attendees came away with not only how the assignment was modified, but also how Williams’ approached grading and feedback for this new type of assessment. Most notably, she explained how this approach cut her grading time by 75%, providing a replicable model for more efficient and effective evaluation in legal writing courses.

The Rocky Mountain Regional Legal Writing Conference began in 2000 at University of Arizona Law as the brainchild of Professor Suzanne Rabe (University of Arizona Law), Professor Judy Stinson (Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law), and Professor Terrill Pollman (Boyd School of Law at UNLV). The three professors designed the conference as an informal exchange of teaching ideas among legal writing professors from schools in the loosely defined “Rocky Mountain” region, but it quickly grew into one of the largest and most popular regional legal writing conferences in the nation, drawing participants from across the nation and, indeed, across the globe.

Over the years, the conference location has rotated among the three founding schools, but has also taken place at other schools in the region, including the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder; the University of New Mexico School of Law in Albuquerque; the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in Denver; and the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law in Salt Lake City.