The Survey Committee, a joint committee of both ALWD and LWI, conducts the Annual Survey and reports the results of the Annual Survey to the membership of ALWD and LWI.  Each year, the Committee revises the content of the Annual Survey as appropriate, identifies designated school responders for the Institutional Phase, distributes the Annual Survey to the appropriate responders, encourages responses through group and individual reminders, and prepares and distributes the report of results for the Annual Survey.  The Survey Committee also periodically reviews the effectiveness of the survey platform and the scope and content of the Annual Survey and submits any related recommendations to the LWI and ALWD Boards.

For more than two decades, ALWD and LWI have jointly conducted an annual survey to gather information about legal writing programs and legal writing faculty.  After sporadic informal surveys about the legal writing field going back as far as 1959, the Legal Writing Institute’s first systematic effort to survey schools about their legal writing programs started in 1990 with Jill J. Ramsfield serving as reporter. Professor Ramsfield repeated her efforts in 1992 and 1994.  In 1995, concomitant with the beginnings of the Association of Legal Writing Directors, Jan Levine, assisted by Louis J. Sirico, drafted and tested a pilot survey.  Their goal was to create a survey instrument that paid greater attention to gathering detailed information more consistent with the ABA Sourcebook.  The pilot became the template for a greatly expanded 1997 survey of legal writing programs conducted by Lou Sirico under the auspices of the Association of Legal Writing Directors.  The next year, 1998, ALWD and LWI collaborated to create a jointly sponsored annual survey of legal writing programs.  That survey was modified slightly when the survey migrated from print to internet-based data gathering.  That version of the survey was conducted jointly by both ALWD and LWI through the 2014-2015 academic year.

From the 1997-1998 Survey through the 2014-2015 Survey, the questions in the survey instrument remained virtually unchanged, despite the growth and changing status of legal writing programs, the increasing longevity of legal writing faculty, and rapid changes in technology.  The goal of this consistency was to enhance comparability of data over time.

Ultimately, however, ALWD and LWI concluded that the changes in the field were so significant that it was time to modernize the Annual Survey.  In 2011, ALWD and LWI created a joint Survey Task Force.  The report of the Survey Task Force called for a substantial overhaul to the existing survey. 

From 2013 to 2018, the Survey Revision Subcommittee of the Survey Committee implemented the report’s recommendations.  After vetting and selecting a new survey platform and a survey design consultant, the Subcommittee turned to the revision of the survey instrument.  Following a blind grant process, the Subcommittee selected a lead author to work with the consultant and the Subcommittee to revise the survey instrument.  From 2015 to 2017, the Subcommittee and the lead author worked to revise the structure, scope, and content of the survey instrument with the goal of creating an expanded and modernized Annual Survey that reflected the complex realities of legal writing programs and legal writing faculty in the 21st century. 

The modernized and expanded Annual Survey now has two phases.  The first phase is the Institutional Phase, which focuses on broad information about legal writing faculty and the legal writing curriculum at each responding school.  The second phase is the Individual Phase, which seeks more detailed information from individual faculty members who teach legal writing courses.  The Institutional Phase was implemented with the 2016-2017 Survey.  The Individual Phase was implemented with the 2017-2018 Survey.

Overhauling the Annual Survey, collecting data with an entirely new survey instrument, and then reporting that data for the first time was a major endeavor, requiring the efforts of many people over several years.  The endeavor is described in more detail in the History of the Annual Survey section of the Report of the 2016-2017 Survey.  ALWD is forever grateful to those who committed their time and energy to this important project, including:

• Joint Survey Task Force Members: Maria Crist (chair), Ben Bratman, Kim Chanbonpin, John Mollenkamp, Sharon Pocock, Judy Rosenbaum, Mary Rose Strubbe, and Tori Tabor;
• Survey Revision Subcommittee Members: Jodi Wilson (chair, 2013-2018), Meredith Aden (2013-2018), Ted Becker (2013-2018), Ben Bratman (2013-2016), Jan Levine (2013-2016), Peter Nemerovski (2013-2018), Michael Oeser (2013-2016), and Judy Rosenbaum (2013-2014);
• Lead Author: Ken Chestek; and
• Survey Administration Subcommittee (2016-2017): Alyssa Dragnich (chair), Raul Fernandez-Calienes, Kristin Knudsen, Gail Mullins, Dyane O’Leary, Judy Rosenbaum, Marci Rosenthal, and Susie Salmon. 

As part of the redesign, the Annual Survey is now conducted using a new survey platform.  The new platform, Qualtrics, allows for the results for each question to be analyzed in several different ways.  The published reports attempt to provide the results in the most user-friendly format.  From time to time, the Survey Committee may supplement the published reports with additional reports providing more complex analyses (e.g., breaking out the responses to one question based upon the responses to another question), aggregating data, or looking at the data from a different perspective.  If you would like to see the results analyzed in a different manner or have questions about the Annual Survey, please contact one of the Survey Committee co-chairs.  Click here to contact the current ALWD-appointed co-chair of the Survey Committee.