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30 Legal Writing: J. Legal Writing Inst. i (2026)

handle is hein.journals/jlwriins30 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITOR'S NOTE Welcome to Volume 30 of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute. A milestone anniversary offers a natural opportunity to take stock, perhaps especially when it coincides with a transformation of the way lawyers, students, and professors create legal documents, course materials, and even academic publications.1 On behalf of the Editorial Board, I am thrilled to share four articles (three on pedagogy and one that introduces a readability score for adjudicative decisions) that are both timely and timeless; four essays that reflect on continuity and change in legal writing; and five essays from Editors in Chief of past and future volumes. Articles Volume 30 opens with Katrina Robinson's Invigorating Conferencing, for which she won the Legal Writing Institute's Emerging Scholar Award. Robinson synthesizes and critiques three decades of scholarship on the professor-student conferences that have become a cornerstone of legal writing pedagogy. She argues that publications about live critiquing techniques deserve greater attention. Robinson concludes that the conferencing pedagogy canon offers wisdom and concrete pointers as law professors grapple with the new and constantly evolving realities presented by generative Al. The need to adapt to the generative Al era takes center stage in Martin McKown's Check-Ride for Legal Writers: Using Aviation Pedagogy to Rethink Assessment in the Age of Generative A. Focusing on assessment, McKown advocates for adding scenario- based oral exams to the first-year legal writing curriculum. The check-ride exam in the aviation industry, which had to rethink how to train and assess pilots after the introduction of autopilot, provides a valuable model. In The Magic of Mistakes in Promoting Learning in the Legal Writing Classroom, Diana Simon tackles an always salient dilemma in legal education: How can law professors make space for errors in a pressure-cooker environment that instills anxiety about mistakes? After examining the extensive cognitive science on learning from errors, grit, and growth mindset, Simon offers strategies professors can use to create a legal writing classroom that embraces mistakes as a valuable teaching and learning tool. 1 I am writing and editing this Editor's Note without assistance from generative Al. This disclosure may well seem quaint a few years from now, perhaps akin to how I might perceive a statement that an author opted for a typewriter rather than a computer.