Legal Education Commons^™

Moving Toward A Competency Based Model For Fostering Law Students’ Relational Skills, Susan L. Brooks, Marjorie A. Silver, Sarah Fishel, Kellie Wiltsie

Scholarly Works

Legal education has long been criticized for failing to provide adequate professional training to prepare graduates for legal practice realities. Many sources have lamented the lack of sufficient attention to the range of competencies necessary for law graduates to be effective practitioners and develop a positive professional identity, including those that are intra-personal, such as self-awareness, critical self-reflection, and self-directedness; those that are interpersonal, such as deep and reflective listening, empathy, compassion, cross-cultural communication, and dialogue; and those that engage with the social/systemic dimension of lawyering, such as appreciating the role of multiple identities, implicit bias, privilege and power, and …

Getting Into The Field, Jay A. Mitchell

Journal of Food Law & Policy

A group of students enrolled in a law school clinic wanders through a large farmers' market. They stop to chat with the proprietors of a farm that has sold vegetables at the market for many years. They visit with a cheesemaker and an apple grower. A second group learns about the economic costs of organic production from a farmer and talks with an olive oil producer. Both sets of students seem unusually attentive to their surroundings. That may be because the first group helped the sponsor of the market rework the market's rules and regulations, and the second developed a …

Looking Back: A Case Study Of Career Interest And Experiential Learning In Law School, David I.C. Thomson, Stephen Daniels

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article is divided into four parts. First, some general observations on what led us to think about our research differently-the importance of career relevance with attention to students interested in a business-related career. Second, an overview of our ongoing study of students and experiential learning at Denver Law-a study designed to follow an incoming class as it goes from first year to last and into the practice of law. Third, through the lens of career interest, an analysis of 1L Denver Law students' preferred style of learning and their views on experiential learning. Fourth, a corresponding analysis of Denver …

And Now A Crisis In Legal Education, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

The current crisis in legal education coincides with a crisis in the practice of law. Law practice has changed as a result of technology, globalization, and economic pressures. The market for legal education's product, law graduates, have diminished. Law schools cannot remain the same in this environment. Except for a very small number of elite schools, those that do not adjust are at serious risk of failing.

An economic change has taken place against a system in which mostly corporate clients willingly paid for the training of beginners at major law firms. Law firms could absorb those costs if partners …

Are You Experienced? - Simple Timesheets For Experiential Learning Courses, Eleanor C. Lanier, Leslie Grove

Presentations

ABA Standards require students to complete six credit hours of experiential learning. Hours must be tracked, and field placements in particular require students to keep logs of their activities to document compliance. Various web-based solutions are used, including “high-end suites like CORE ELMS, the Symplicity experiential learning module, and the basic and free Dropbox and Google Suite” as well as Canvas, and a time-tracking program called Tick. Here at the University of Georgia School of Law, we decided to add simple timesheet functionality to our Drupal-based student portal, allowing students to securely log their hours and activities, and faculty to …

To The Head Of The Class? Quantifying The Relationship Between Participation In Undergraduate Mock Trial Programs And Student Performance In Law School, Teresa Nesbitt Cosby

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Article seeks to answer the question of whether students who engage in undergraduate mock trial competitions gain a competitive advantage in law school. The Article will examine the pedagogy of experiential learning methods by analyzing how student performance in undergraduate school compares to how these same students perform in law school, and, importantly, whether these students are gainfully employed in a law-related career after law school. This is accomplished by conducting four interviews with Furman alumni who participated in the undergraduate mock trial program during their tenures, and a survey targeting law school students and recent graduates who …

From The Courtroom To The Classroom: How A Litigator Became A Transactional Drafting Professor, Amy Bauer

Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Trending @ Rwu Law: Olabisi Davies's Post: Remembering A Perfect Summer -- In The Bronx!, Olabisi Davies

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Trending @ Rwulaw: Ed Weiss's Post: From The Red Sox Gc: Knowing The Law, Knowing The Business, Weiss Ed

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Trending@Rwu Law: Professor Diana Hassel's Post: Providence, Here We Come!, Diana Hassel

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Toward A Writing-Centered Legal Education, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

The future of legal education should bridge the divide between learning and practicing the law. This requires three things. First, tuition should bear some reasonable relationship to graduates’ employment outcomes. Perhaps Harvard is justified in charging $50,000 in tuition, but a fourth-tier law school is not. Second, no school should resist infusing more practical skills training into the curriculum. This does not mean that law schools should focus on adding clinics and externships to the curriculum. The focus should be on developing critical thinkers and persuasive writers that can solve real-world legal problems. Third, law schools should be transparent about …

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 …

Legal Education In Transition: Trends And Their Implications, Michael A. Millemann, Sheldon Krantz

Faculty Scholarship

This is a pivotal moment in legal education. Revisions in American Bar Association accreditation standards, approved in August 2014, impose new requirements, including practice-based requirements, on law schools. Other external regulators and critics are pushing for significant changes too. For example, the California bar licensing body is proposing to add a practice-based, experiential requirement to its licensing requirements, and the New York Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, is giving third-year, second semester students the opportunity to practice full-time in indigent legal services programs and projects. Unbeknown to many, there have been significant recent changes in legal education that …

Preparing For Service: A Template For 21st Century Legal Education, Michael J. Madison

Articles

Legal educators today grapple with the changing dynamics of legal employment markets; the evolution of technologies and business models driving changes to the legal profession; and the economics of operating – and attending – a law school. Accrediting organizations and practitioners pressure law schools to prepare new lawyers both to be ready to practice and to be ready for an ever-fluid career path. From the standpoint of law schools in general and any one law school in particular, constraints and limitations surround us. Adaptation through innovation is the order of the day.

How, when, and in what direction should innovation …

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 …

A Proposal To The Aba: Integrating Legal Writing And Experiential Learning Into A Required, Six-Semester Curriculum That Trains Students In Core Competencies, 'Soft Skills,' And Real-World Judgment, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Experiential learning is not the answer to the problems facing legal education. Simulations, externships, and clinics are vital aspects of a real-world legal education, but they cannot alone produce competent graduates. The better approach is to create a required, six-semester experiential legal writing curriculum where students draft and re-draft the most common litigation documents and engage in simulations, including client interviews, mediation, depositions, settlement negotiations, and oral arguments in the order that they would in actual practice. In so doing, law schools can provide the time and context within which students can truly learn to think like lawyers, do what …

A Proposal To The Aba: One Required Legal Writing Course For All Six Semesters Of Law School, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

If you decide to run a marathon, but stop training after the eighth week of a sixteen-week training schedule, you will not finish. Why? Your muscles atrophied, and your stamina declined. If you stop writing after the second or third semester of law school, you will not become a good legal writer. Why? Your skills atrophied. You did not develop mental memory—just like the marathon runner did not develop muscle memory.

Why did the marathon runner stop? Maybe life got in the way, or training became too hard. But it’s the difficult moments—the grind—that separates the marathon runner from the …

Show, Don't Tell: Legal Writing For The Real World (Chapter Outline), Adam Lamparello, Megan E. Boyd

Adam Lamparello

Show, Don’t Tell is designed to help all members of the legal profession learn to effectively draft the most common litigation documents. Far too many books offer tips and advice about good writing, but don’t actually show the reader specific examples of good writing or show the reader why examples offered are effective. The authors have read many books on legal writing, but once we learned the basics of legal writing, we didn’t learn anything in those books to make us better writers. Why? We were exposed to the best theories, but never given practical, how-to tips to turn book …

Legal Writing--What's Next? Real-World Persuasion Pedagogy From Day One, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

So, why didn’t they teach me this in law school?” The problem has nothing to do with ‘bad’ or uncaring teachers, but with a pedagogical approach that mistakenly divorces the acquisition of legal knowledge—and practical skills training—from their functional roles in the real world. In law school, students are typically required to write a memorandum or an appellate brief, but without knowing how each document fits into the broader context of actual law practice, the student’s ability to put that knowledge to practical use is limited. Every litigation document, whether it is, for example, a legal memorandum, complaint, motion to …

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 …

And Now A Crisis In Legal Education, James E. Moliterno

Scholarly Articles

The current crisis in legal education coincides with a crisis in the practice of law. Law practice has changed as a result of technology, globalization, and economic pressures. The market for legal education's product, law graduates, have diminished. Law schools cannot remain the same in this environment. Except for a very small number of elite schools, those that do not adjust are at serious risk of failing.

An economic change has taken place against a system in which mostly corporate clients willingly paid for the training of beginners at major law firms. Law firms could absorb those costs if partners …

Experiential Education As Critical Pedagogy: Enhancing The Law School Experience, Spearit, Stephanie Ledesma

Articles

This article examines the shift to greater experiential education in law school through the lens of critical pedagogy. At its base, critical pedagogy is about devising more equitable methods of teaching, helping students develop consciousness of freedom, and helping them connect knowledge to power. The insights of critical pedagogy are valuable for a fuller understanding of experiential education and its potential to affect students in profound ways, particularly as a means of empowerment. Although this is an understudied area of pedagogical scholarship, power relations are at the heart of legal education. Critical pedagogy offers a frame for considering how experiential …

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 …

A Heretical View Of Teaching: A Contrarian Looks At Teaching, The Carnegie Report, And Best Practices, Gary Shaw

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Practice-Ready: The False Dichotomy Between Theory And Practice, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The leaders in education reform understand that the goal is to create multi-faceted and balanced graduates – those who not only understand the law at a deep level, but also know how to use the law to solve their clients’ problems. Yes, it is probably important for a future litigator to understand how to take a deposition. But if we teach that skill, it is not instead of teaching the doctrine that will support the theory of the case (and the ability to research and understand that doctrine), or even the theory behind the doctrine, which would allow the graduate …

Response To The David Segal Article, November 19, 2011, In New York Times, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

As David Segal’s November 19 article accurately reflects, the legal market is changing. Clients are no longer willing to foot the bill for young lawyers’ training, and thus law firms are increasingly looking to the law schools to produce practice-ready graduates.

The good news is that there are clear solutions to the problem, and they are already in motion. A report published in 2007 by the Carnegie Foundation entitled "Education Lawyers" identified precisely the problem described in Mr. Segal’s article and suggested that law schools should address it by developing courses that educate law students on three levels: knowledge, practice …

Why This Time Is Different: The Perfect Storm And The Future Of Legal Education, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

When we discuss legal education reform, some of the more jaded members of our community often ask, “Why is this time any different?” They rattle off a list of dust-covered reports about proposed reforms for legal education, often dating back several decades, and wonder how we can be optimistic about the prospects for meaningful reform now.

The answer is that we are in the midst of a perfect storm; one in which several powerful forces are driving law schools toward reform.

The Profession Of Law: Columbia Law School's Use Of Experiential Learning Techniques To Teach Professional Responsibility, Carol B. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Columbia Law School's ethics course, "The Profession of Law" ("POL"), is an interactive, experiential exploration of lawyer ethics. The course, required for all third-year students, is taught on an intensive basis during the first week of the fall semester. It begins on Monday morning, the first day of the semester, and runs through mid-afternoon on the following Friday. The course has five goals: to introduce students to the rules that govern professional conduct; to help them develop an analytic framework for making ethical decisions in those broad areas where the rules do not give clear answers; to provoke them to …