It’s a fundamental part of every law school education. Now, buoyed by technology and a ground-up approach to delivery, the Queen’s Law Introduction to Legal Skills course is delivering something unique in Canada. 

“No other law school has taken quite this approach to legal skills training,” says Erik Knutsen, Associate Dean, Academic at Queen’s Law. “We’ve revamped our delivery model for this course from the standpoint of our first-year students. We put ourselves in their shoes – and worked with a student just out of first year – to ask ourselves ‘What do they need? What is practical?’” 

ILS has been a mainstay of the Queen’s curriculum for some time. As Knutsen describes it, it has long been a well-structured, solid introduction to the practical aspects of lawyering every student needs to know. 

“We were building on a course with a great approach and a solid pedigree,” he says. “For this take, we really wanted to look at how far we could push our delivery model. And we were uniquely positioned to do that. We have the course coordinator, Hugo Choquette, who has years of experience in teaching both the past model of ILS and cutting-edge online and blended learning law courses. We have a full-time education developer working in the Faculty, Katherine Prescott. The Assistant Dean of Students at the time, Heather Cole (Law'96), has doctoral training in education. I have some varied experience with law teaching and with online law teaching, and prior to that have been a practising lawyer. We had a law student, Chris Sullivan, working extensively with us on this.” 

The result was an approach that built on the course’s existing strengths, but with a renewed focus on three modalities to teach. “The question we were asking was ‘how do you develop skills?’ Because how you learn a skill is different than how you learn information,” Knutsen explains. “That’s how we landed on a distinct model with three types of delivery.” 

First: video. What used to be in-class lectures are now compressed video units, which students can watch (and rewatch) at their convenience. Former long in-person sessions with an instructor talking at a class are now “kernalized” 3-10 minute videos, each focusing on a specific topic. “Katherine has been instrumental here, in prompting us to look at how we deliver information and compressing it to the essentials,” Knutsen says. “By compressing these down to essential pieces of information, and letting students view them at their discretion, we free up more time for work in the classroom.” 

Work in the classroom being the second delivery type. “Class is supposed to deliver an experience,” Knutsen says. “You’re there to experiment, draft things, get positive or negative feedback on your work. We bring in practitioners to our classes to lead tutorials on the legal skills they use every day, and those become specific, directed exercises that students get live feedback from. The goal is to create a safe place to fail: you learn from doing assignments that let you get things wrong, practice, and grow – things that always connect back to skills you’ll need and use as a lawyer.”

The third delivery type is plenary sessions, “the ‘greatest hits,’” Knutsen says. “This is where it all comes together. Literally: we bring all of our first-year students together in a classroom and connect them to experts who use the skills they’ve been exploring. Professors like Lisa Kelly or Michael Pratt might explain how the skills behind legal reasoning has affected their work. Alumni like Justice David Stratas (Law’84, LLD’12), of the Federal Court of Appeal, can speak to how persuasive writing has made or broken briefs he’s seen in his career on the bench.” 

“What we’ve done is try to deconstruct how people learn legal skills,” Knutsen says. “We’ve chosen formats that let us take the ‘hide the ball’ out of grading, with clear rubrics and exemplars for assignments. We will put our TAs through grading clinics so they can cross-grade and compare assignments so they know they’re marking consistently. And we encourage continual feedback from our students, both directly and through mid-term check-ins that Katherine has developed.” 

What’s the impact on teachers? Surprisingly, Knutsen says, the model delivers a better learning experience with more efficient use of instructor time. Professors, like Queen’s Law faculty member Michael Pratt, appreciate both the ILS team’s attention to detail and focus on the essentials. 

“Erik and his team have put legal reasoning skills right at the core of the ILS curriculum, exactly where they belong,” Pratt says. “This permits those of us who teach in the first-year curriculum to invoke and employ the analytical skills being taught in ILS when we teach the substantive law. It’s a really valuable synergy, and I’ve already observed a firmer grasp of basic common law method among my students this year than in the past.”

“We’ve worked ruthlessly to crop things back to core essentials with the videos, and leave more time for meaningful interaction in class,” says Erik Knutsen. “And where we’ve landed is a new approach to a type of law class that dates back years. People have been teaching “introduction to legal skills” around the world for decades. This is an opportunity to really apply 21st-century pedagogy and technology to it and determine how to teach these skills – in the way that’s best for the student.”