Law professor Diana Donahoe turned to CNDLS to help her design and create an online legal writing textbook. She envisioned an immersive environment that would simulate the activities of a junior partner in a law firm. By interacting with legal texts through the application (dissecting their parts, restating their arguments, and reviewing their structures), students would develop their legal writing skills.

Ultimately, the CNDLS web development team and Donahoe produced an online textbook that covers all the materials a legal writing class utilizes. The interactive resources not only provide students with tools to improve their legal writing—including case studies, exercises, and streaming video testimonials from fellow law students and lawyers on effective research strategies—but also present faculty with new ways to teach it. The online textbook, known as "TeachingLaw," allows faculty to manage their entire class through the interface. Instructors may upload new content, tailored for their specific class, and in the near future, the program will allow faculty to create their own interactive content on the site, employing all the interactive features of the existing assignments. An 'assignment bank' is planned that will provide any faculty member using the site access to novel assignments 'published' on the site by other participating faculty. Faculty will also share a commentary area where the assignments can be discussed. For example, Donohoe uses real-life annotated legal briefs, revealed by a mouse-click in layers of "topic sentences," "roadmaps," or "consider omitting." This component, and the vast number of others, are all inter-linked for easy reference.

The program also allows students to: upload their assignments and receive commented responses; automatically report of the results of their self-assessment exercises in individual and cumulative scores; take online quizzes to clarify their understanding of particular grammar rules.

"TeachingLaw" is in the final stages of development and has been piloted in Diana's writing law classes. Members of the CNDLS and Law Center staffs are holding sessions with the students to test the website's usability and refine it accordingly.