UND Law’s Carolyn Williams receives national award for scholarship in legal communication

University of North Dakota School of Law Assistant Professor Carolyn V. Williams has received the Teresa Godwin Phelps Award for Scholarship in Legal Communication from the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) for her article “Bracing for Impact: Revising Legal Writing Assessments Ahead of the Collision of Generative AI and the NextGen Bar Exam.” LWI is the world’s largest organization devoted to improving legal communication, with more than 3,000 members at nearly every ABA-accredited law school.

The Phelps Award honors a single outstanding scholarly work each year, underscoring its selectivity and significance. Named for Professor Teresa Godwin Phelps, whose pioneering scholarship helped establish legal writing as a respected academic field, the award recognizes discipline-building work that advances the theories, practices, and intellectual foundations of legal communication. The sole criterion for the award is the quality of the individual work of scholarship. Nominees undergo a rigorous review process conducted by a national committee of leading scholars and the LWI Board, who evaluate solely whether an individual work makes an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the discipline of legal writing, with no consideration of the author’s long-term contributions to the field or contributions in service, program design, teaching, or improving status for the legal writing field. The award is meant to set aspirational standards for others who produce scholarship in legal communication.

Williams’s winning article explores how generative artificial intelligence and the forthcoming NextGen Bar Exam require law schools to rethink legal writing assessment. Her work offers guidance as the profession navigates rapid technological and pedagogical change.

In addition to her scholarship, Williams is a national leader on AI and legal communication. She co-founded and facilitates the monthly Generative AI and Legal Writing Convo Group, now with more than 550 scholars, and is a frequent speaker on generative AI for academic conferences, bar associations and professional organizations across the country.