PROGRAM PROFILE

Advanced Legal Writing at Santa Clara Law

Devin Kinyon is an Associate Clinical Professor and Director of the Office of Academic and Bar Success at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Santa Clara’s core bar exam preparation program is a course called Advanced Legal Writing: The Bar Exam (ALW). We have offered this course for many years in different forms, targeted at our weakest students, entirely driven by individual instructors’ preferences, with inconsistent impacts. In the mid-2010s, we began a critical faculty conversation about how we could better support our students in their bar exam preparation. Among the changes we adopted was a wholesale redesign of ALW.

Redesign

I credit my predecessor bar director, Professor Mike Flynn, with setting the goals for the new ALW. All students would have a uniform experience, regardless of their instructor. The course would emphasize skills and practice. And we would add MBE preparation, a specific challenge area for our bar takers. Around that time, we participated in the AccessLex Bar Exam Success Analyses program which evaluated our students’ bar needs and suggested that we should be targeting interventions at the middle quartiles of our graduating classes. With this insight, we also committed to offering ALW to any graduating student.