With the Thanksgiving holiday fast approaching, many 1L legal writing programs in the U.S. are almost done for the fall semester. As our students wrestle with that last big paper, they’re in our offices, having individual conferences on their drafts and asking lots of questions. A tricky aspect of scheduling the course every year seems to be timing the conferences just right.
Schedule the conferences too soon, and the students don’t have serious drafts ready. They haven’t done enough of the difficult thinking work yet to know what their real questions are. The quarter or half an hour you set aside for a student ends up being time wasted.
Schedule conferences too late, and the students won’t have enough time to incorporate into their papers what they figure out during their conferences. Even worse, some students will put off doing the hard thinking work until it’s too late to produce a strong paper.
The right timing IS possible to achieve, with a lot of forethought and a little luck. And when you do, those intense, long days of back-to-back conferences can be less draining and more productive. (spl)