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Utah’S Online Dispute Resolution Program, Deno Himonas

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article by Utah Supreme Court Justice Deno Himonas describes Utah’s Online Dispute Resolution or ODR system. Launched in September 2018, Utah’s ODR system is available to litigants who have small claims disputes that involve $11,000 or less. The ODR system has been designed to provide “simple, quick, inexpensive and easily accessible justice” that includes “individualized assistance and information that is accessible across a multitude of electronic platforms.”

This article describes the history and philosophy behind Utah’s ODR system and includes a number of screen shots that show what an ODR litigant will see. Utah is the first U.S. state …

The Uneasy History Of Experiential Education In U.S. Law Schools, Peter A. Joy

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article explores the history of legal education, particularly the rise of experiential learning and its importance. In the early years of legal education in the United States, law schools devalued the development of practical skills in students, and many legal educators viewed practical experience in prospective faculty as a “taint.” This article begins with a brief history of these early years and how legal education subsequently evolved with greater involvement of the American Bar Association (ABA). With involvement of the ABA came a call for greater uniformity in legal education and guidelines to help law schools establish criteria for …

The Integrated Law School Curriculum, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

In January 2014, the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education stated that “[a]n evolution is taking place in legal practice and legal education needs to evolve with it.” To this end, the Task Force recommended that the law school curriculum “needs to shift still further toward developing the competencies and professionalism required of people who will deliver services to clients.” In fact, the Task Force emphasized that “[a] graduate’s having some set of competencies in the delivery of law and related services, and not just some body of knowledge, is an essential outcome …

The Moral Lawyer And The Machiavellian Nature Of Law Practice, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

In Western culture the name Niccolo Machiavelli has become Machiavellianism, a pejorative signifying the willingness to do anything to achieve desired ends. American lawyers do have limits, however, and are expected to operate according to an ethical code that is at least intended to prevent the worst abuses. The effectiveness of this ethical code has often been questioned, as have the questionable efforts of the organized bar to enforce its rules, but on the surface it differentiates law practice from hand-to-hand combat and military struggles. Even though I have sometimes used the concepts of the warrior lawyer, the general and …

The Death Of Academic Support: Creating A Truly Integrated, Experiential, And Assessment Driven Academic Success And Bar Preparation Program, Adam Lamparello, Laura Dannebohm

Adam Lamparello

For too long, academic support programs have been viewed as the unwanted stepchild of legal education. These programs have existed in the dark shadows of legal education, reserved for students deemed “at risk” for satisfactorily completing law school or successfully passing the bar examination, and focused on keeping students above the dreaded academic dismissal threshold. The time has arrived for the remedial – and stereotypical – character of academic support to meet its demise, and to be reborn as a program that helps all students to become better lawyers, not just better law students.

In this article, we propose a …

The End Of Law Schools, Ray W. Campbell

Ray W Campbell

What would legal education look like if it were designed from the ground up for a world in which legal services have undergone profound and irreversible change? Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern …

Experiential Education And Our Divided Campuses: What Delivers Practice Value To Big Law Associates, Government Attorneys, And Public Interest Lawyers?, Margaret E. Reuter, Joanne Ingham

Margaret E. Reuter

How will law schools meet the challenge of expanding their education in lawyering skills as demanded from critics and now required by the ABA? This article examines the details of the experiential coursework (clinic, field placement, and skills courses) of 2,142 attorneys. It reveals that experiential courses have not been comparably pursued or valued by former law students as they headed to careers in different settings and types of law practice. Public interest lawyers took many of these types of courses, at intensive levels, and valued them highly. In marked contrast, corporate lawyers in large firms took far fewer. When …

The End Of Law Schools, Ray Worthy Campbell

Ray W Campbell

Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern society. Unlike other reform proposals, it looks not to tweaking the training of traditional lawyers, but to rethinking legal education in light of a changing legal services …

Why The Bar Examination Fails To Raise The Bar, Carol Goforth

Carol Goforth

The Moral Lawyer And The Machiavellian Nature Of Law Practice, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

In Western culture the name Niccolo Machiavelli has become Machiavellianism, a pejorative signifying the willingness to do anything to achieve desired ends. American lawyers do have limits, however, and are expected to operate according to an ethical code that is at least intended to prevent the worst abuses. The effectiveness of this ethical code has often been questioned, as have the questionable efforts of the organized bar to enforce its rules, but on the surface it differentiates law practice from hand-to-hand combat and military struggles. Even though I have sometimes used the concepts of the warrior lawyer, the general and …

Experiential Legal Writing: The New Approach To Practicing Like A Lawyer, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Law students engage in various types of “experiential” learning activities while in school, such as clinics and externships, but they graduate without the experience necessary to practice law. This is traceable to a glaring deficiency at most law schools: a writing program that is comprehensive, properly sequenced, and integrated across and throughout the law school curriculum.

First, most graduates have never drafted the documents they will encounter in law practice. Additionally, they have not drafted and re-drafted such documents while also participating in real-world simulations as they would in actual practice. Instead, students graduate having drafted an appellate brief, a …

Legal Writing - What's Next? Real-World, Persuasion Pedagogy From Day One—It’S Not What You Offer; It’S What You Require – Part Ii (In A Three-Part Series), Adam Lamparello, Charles Maclean

Adam Lamparello

This essay (part two of a three-part series) strives to begin a collaborative discussion with legal writing, clinical, and doctrinal faculty about what “change” in legal education should mean. In Part I, the authors rolled out a blueprint for transformative change in legal writing pedagogy, which includes: (1) more required skills courses that mirror the actual practice of law; (2) a three-year program that includes up to four writing credits in every semester; and (3) increased collaboration between legal writing professors and doctrinal faculty. In this essay, we get more specific, and propose a three-year legal writing curriculum that builds …

No Shoehorn Required: How A Required, Three-Year, Persuasion-Based Legal Writing Program Easily Fits Within The Broader Law School Curriculum, Adam Lamparello, Charles Maclean

Adam Lamparello

In prior articles, we advocated for a required fifteen-credit, three-year, persuasion-based, linear legal writing curriculum. Our model begins with persuasive advocacy from the first day of law school, and takes a sequential approach that mirrors the practice of law — from the initial client meeting to the appellate brief.

It includes a separate track for those interested in transactional work, incorporates alternative dispute resolution and settlement simulations, and involves students in researching and drafting amicus briefs before federal appellate courts. Students are also offered several electives each semester to complement their required course load, and receive intense training in narrative …

Continuing Legal Education A Year In Review: Analysis And Recommendations, Shaun Jamison

Shaun Jamison

Continuing legal education (CLE or MCLE) is one way to help lawyers stay current with substantive law, skills, and prepare for potentially dramatic and fast moving changes to the practice of law. This paper examines one year of continuing legal education approved for credit in Minnesota. While Minnesota attorneys enjoy access to over 10,000 CLE courses in a variety of timely topics, there are opportunities to improve. In order to best address the rapid and dramatic change in the legal field, a more favorable regulation of law office management CLEs is required. More flexible regulation and partnerships between CLE providers, …

Student, Esquire?: The Practice Of Law In The Collaborative Classroom, Nantiya Ruan

Nantiya Ruan

Law faculty and non-profit lawyers are working together in a variety of partnerships to offer students exposure to “real life” clients in the first year of law school, as well as in advanced courses in substantive areas. Teachers engaged in client-centered advocacy through experiential frameworks have broken out of their isolated silos in the law school (e.g., legal writing, clinical, externship, and doctrinal) and begun to work together. To help students develop a sense of professional identity, cultivate professional values, and tap into key intrinsic motivations for lawyering, such as serving the public good, collaborative classrooms have an important role …

Law And Negotiation: Necessary Partners Or Strange Bedfellows?, Nancy Schultz

Nancy Schultz

To what degree does legal authority dictate the outcomes of negotiations? Scholars have discussed the issue, and law students argue about it in their negotiation classes. A survey of practicing lawyers reveals that knowing the law is an important part of the preparation for negotiation, but that legal authority is not the primary determinant of negotiated outcomes in practice. Financial constraints, bargaining power, and negotiating skill are all reported as having a greater effect on negotiated outcomes than the law.

Teaching Students To Negotiate Like A Lawyer, John Lande

John Lande

Teaching students to negotiate effectively is central to their thinking, acting, and being like good lawyers. Virtually all lawyers spend much of their time negotiating, whether they deal with disputes or transactions. So law school negotiation courses should provide the most realistic possible portrayal of legal negotiation. This essay is intended to help instructors plan and teach negotiation courses, recognizing that every course should be tailored to fit the interests, capabilities, resources, and constraints of the instructors and students. This essay argues that many lawyers engage in “ordinary legal negotiation” (OLN), which is distinct from “romantic” theories of positional and …

Teaching Transactional Skills In Partnership With The Bar, Carl J. Circo

Carl J. Circo

The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, John Lande, Jean R. Sternlight

John Lande

This Article briefly reviews the long history of critiques of legal education that highlight the failure to adequately prepare students for what they will and should do as attorneys. It takes a sober look at the hurdles reformers face when trying to make significant curricular changes. Recognizing these substantial barriers, it proposes a modest and feasible menu of reforms that interested faculty and law schools can achieve without investing substantial additional resources. The proposals are not intended as a comprehensive package to be implemented on an all-or-nothing basis but as a set of options to be selected by individual faculty …

The Status Of Part-Time Evening Programs?: Transcript Of Proceedings, Katherine S, Broderick

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Flattening The World Of Legal Services? The Ethical And Liability Minefields Of Offshoring Legal And Law-Related Services, Carole Silver, Mary Daly

Carole Silver

This article examines offshore outsourcing of legal and law-related services as the newest twist in the international market for legal services. We consider the impact of offshore outsourcing on the profession generally and analyze the ethical issues raised by offshore outsourcing, both as it exists today and as the practice may develop in the future. The article begins by situating offshore outsourcing in the framework of relationships created in the context of delivery of legal services. This framework is used, in turn, to construct a structure of analysis for the ethical implications of offshore outsourcing. Lawyers who outsource to offshore …

Learning To Writing In Code: The Value Of Using Legal Writing Exercises To Teach Tax Law, Scott A. Schumacher

ExpressO

Traditionally, law school tax courses have been taught using a mix of problems, class discussion, the Socratic method, and one end-of-term exam. The goal of these courses is to introduce students to key concepts of tax law and to teach them the essential skill of reading and interpreting the Internal Revenue Code and Treasury Regulations. This traditional method of instruction is an efficient and cost-effective way of transmitting a great deal of complex information to a large number of students. It is also a good vehicle to teach the essential skill of reading and interpreting the Code. However, the time …

Internationalizing U.S. Legal Education: A Report On The Education Of Transnational Lawyers, Carole Silver

ExpressO

This article analyses the role of U.S. law schools in educating foreign lawyers and the increasingly competitive global market for graduate legal education. U.S. law schools have been at the forefront of this competition, but little has been reported about their graduate programs. This article presents original research on the programs and their students, drawn from interviews with directors of graduate programs at 35 U.S. law schools, information available on law school web sites about the programs, and interviews with graduates of U.S. graduate programs. Finally, the article considers the responses of U.S. law schools to new competition from foreign …

Overview Of Legal Systems In The Asia-Pacific Region: Singapore, Calvin Wl Ho

Overview of Legal Systems in the Asia-Pacific Region (2004)

This article provides a general description of the legal system of Singapore. It further discusses aspects of legal education and legal practice in that country.

Interpersonal Dynamics, Joshua D. Rosenberg

ExpressO

This article explains the importance of relationship skills to attorneys. It explains why, despite the significance of these skills to attorneys, law schools and law firms ignore them. It then explains how these skills can be taught in law school, and how a relation al perspective can become not simply an important part of the law, but also an important part of the lives of lawyers. It develops and supports an ap proach that develops the cognitive, behavioral, perceptual and emotional skills and awareness essential to both accurate communication and productive and meaningful relationships. This approach is quite different from …

Legal Skills For A Transforming Profession, Gary A. Munneke

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The legal profession is undergoing dramatic changes that will drive a reformation in legal education. Legal educators must anticipate these changes to effectively prepare students for the practice of law in the twenty-first century. In order to be proficient practitioners, these students will require an expanded set of professional skills. Although the current legal skills paradigm was articulated by the American Bar Association MacCrate Task Force in 1991, it is time to reexamine legal skills with an eye toward preparing students to practice law in the new millennium. In Section II, this article examines trends in modern society and the …

Bringing The Practice To The Classroom: An Approach To The Professionalism Problem, Steven H. Goldberg

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The first section of this article presents a brief history and description of a professionalism movement that continues to urge law schools to do more to solve the “professionalism problem.” The second discusses legal education's failure to bring professionalism into the law school curriculum. The third describes the structure and teaching method of The Practice—a different kind of course about professionalism—while the fourth discusses the professionalism content of the course. I conclude with a plea for law faculty to direct their considerable talents toward collecting stories and data about the profession and creating material to facilitate law school courses that …