Dungeons & Lawyers: legal simulations and the art of game-mastering

part 1: What’s a legal simulation?

If Paul Maharg has his way, American law professors may soon have as much in common with the game referees in World of Warcraft than Prof. Kingsfield from The Paper Chase. Maharg, author of Transforming Legal Education, is working with CALI to distribute and support software that enables legal educators to run legal practice simulations. SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Legal Education) provides a framework for students to engage in transactions typical of real-life legal practice, providing the kind of contextualized knowledge and skill that the Carnegie Study and others have demanded.

I will leave to the Carnegie Foundation, Maharg’s own writing, and countless other pieces in educational psychology and the learning sciences to explain why context-rich simulation is so effective at teaching knowledge, skills, and values. Let’s assume that, as an instructor, you’re ready to take the leap into simulation-based learning. What is this pedagogy like? What will you need to do to get started?

The virtual worlds that SIMPLE conjures may lack the special effects of World of Warcraft, but they, too, offer twisting plots, colorful characters, and devious puzzles. Students become protagonists who grow in strength by overcoming challenges. Non-Player Characters (“NPCs”) present most of these challenges, whether as the client in need of rescue or the witnesses guarding precious evidence. Fictional websites provide a virtual landscape for the students to explore in order to build their cases. And battle is joined not with the clash of swords but the exchange of documents. All of this might make for a poor adventure film, but it can add up to a believable, even exciting, legal conflict.

Here’s an example:

Students enter the simulation as associates of the firm Kerrigan, Burns & Robertson. KB&R has been retained to represent a company that is being sued for a slip-and-fall that occurred on its property, located in the fictional town of Ardalloch, Scotland. (Another team of students play associates of the firm representing the plaintiff). The students-cum-associates watch a video of the initial client interview and receive, via SIMPLE’s simulated email system, a memo from their supervising partners outlining their role in the case.

Students then engage in both informal and formal discovery, wandering through Ardcalloch via the town’s online directory listing and virtual map (think fictional Yahoo directory and Mapquest pages). They might, for example, contact the local landscaper responsible for maintaining the area where the fall took place; within a few hours or days, they should (if they made a well-formulated request) get a witness statement. (Behind the scenes, what’s really happening is that the students send a SIMPLE message to the simulation staff, who assume the role of the landscaper and respond to the request in a manner consistent with the landscaper’s version of the facts and with the character’s personality).

As the team builds their evidentiary case, they revise their overall strategy. For example, the team might uncover new data that contradict the client’s initial statement of facts, forcing further discussion with the client and perhaps a revision of the overall theory of the case. At some point the two teams meet and negotiate a settlement (court action falls outside the scope of the simulation). The teams then step out of role and review their own performance and learning.

No goblins, no dragons, no magic, and yet this is a bona fide virtual world, one rich with performance-oriented learning experiences for law students. Law professors won’t need to learn to animate 3D monsters – but they’ll certainly need a different set of skills than mesmerizing students with brilliant lectures. They might instead benefit from studying how video games scaffold immersive, effective learning. I’ll take up that topic in the next part of this series.

- Gene Koo