The Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education (CPLED) is a non–profit organization that delivers pre-Bar call legal education for aspiring lawyers in Canada.

CPLED is dedicated to helping students hone their practical skills and assessing how well they can apply their legal knowledge and skills in everyday situations—assisting new lawyers to be well-equipped to meet the demands of practice. CPLED maintains a high standard of programs and services for students to ensure a strong transition into the legal profession. The Legal Research and Writing (LRW) course was developed to help aspiring Canadian lawyers develop fundamental legal research and writing skills in preparation for entry into their Bar admission program.

In 2022 the National Committee of Accreditation (NCA) amended their NCA Assessment policy to require applicants to complete the CPLED LRW course or another approved course in legal research and writing to demonstrate basic competence in legal research and writing as part of their accreditation requirements.

CPLED’s LRW course provides its students with a self-driven online course that allows them to acquire foundational legal research and writing knowledge. Students progress through online modules, complete assignments, and receive feedback to help develop their legal research and writing skills. The combination of knowledge and experiential learning in the LRW course is provided to help students improve their competency in legal research and writing and to better prepare them for entry into a Bar admission program in Canada.

This course is offered four times per year.

Course Overview
The LRW course is a nine-week online course that consists of the following:

1. Two online modules:
   • Legal Research, Fact Gathering and Case Management
   • Written Communications Skills: Legal Writing
   
2. Four assignments (two research and two writing assignments)
   

Students must pass a multiple-choice quiz at the end of each online module and must pass the last two written assignments to successfully complete the course. The course is completed online through the Desire2Learn (D2L) platform.

Assessor Responsibilities
Assessors will be assigned student assignments and will use an online competency-based rubric to assess and provide feedback on student assignments. The feedback will include the completion of the rubric and the provision of written feedback to help student development by identifying where they have performed well and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Your Commitment

• LRW Assessors must commit to assessing between five and fifteen students in an LRW offering. Assessments are completed during weeks four, five, and nine of the course. It is estimated that each student assignment will take approximately one hour to assess
  
• Attend a one-hour virtual orientation session on the assessment criteria, completion of a rubric, and feedback expectations
• Complete a practice assessment
• Attend calibration sessions. For each LRW course, Assessors must calibrate assignments. For the calibration process, Assessors are expected to review prior assignments, which are benchmarked with other Assessors to ensure consistency. The benchmarking is done in the calibration sessions

Requirements

• 5 + Years of experience in the area of law
• Experience assessing/marking legal research, legal writing, or internationally trained students is considered an asset
• Excellent writing and verbal communication
• Experience using D2L is considered an asset
• Successful candidates must be in good standing with their law society
• Legally eligible to work in Canada
• Access to a computer with a reliable high-speed internet connection.

CPLED will also offer optional one-on-one tech sessions in D2L for LRW Assessors to support LRW Assessors who are new or require a refresher with the D2L platform.

Each Contractor of the LRW course is not an employee of CPLED. LRW Assessors will receive an honorarium of $150 for each student or $37.50 per assignment. Please note that the training and calibration process is a requirement for the position and is included in the honorarium.

We acknowledge that our community of students is very diverse, reflecting different identities of gender, race, faith, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation and others, and we aim to reflect these differences with our contractors.

Preference will be given to those candidates who offer demographic diversity (including, without limitation, gender and age diversity) and those who collectively bring the strongest combination of knowledge and experience; understand the concepts of diversity and equity and how those come to play in the education and training of entry-level professionals.

We thank all applicants for their interest and effort in applying for this position; however, only those being considered will be contacted.

Closes: March 15, 2023

Apply for the position on the CPLED website.