In today’s New York Times, THERESA AMATO makes recommendations for addressing the justice-lawyer gap — that frustrating current reality in which United States citizens have tremendous legal needs but no lawyer to help while, at the same time, American law schools graduate a supply of lawyers who need jobs and need to pay their school debt.
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Professor Brian Sites, Coordinator of Experiential Learning at Barry University School of Law in Orlando, Florida, composed a fluid list of experiential learning resources that may be added to and shared among the legal community.
The resources are grouped by, among other methods, course area (i.e. Contracts, Torts, IP, Family Law, etc.). In the list, you will find books that are simulation-based, experiential supplements, law review articles on exercises in that area, websites that have exercises in that area, and exercise ideas.
Professor Sites plans to expand the list as he finds more resources and welcomes emails suggesting additional materials and newly-created exercise ideas.
The link to the resource list and Professor Sites’ contact information may be found below:
Professor Brian Sites
Assistant Professor of Law, Coordinator of Experiential Learning
Barry University Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law
Phone: (321) 206-5685
Email: BSites@barry.edu
SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1490216
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I am reblogging this great news from Albany Law ‘s Multicultural Initiatives Legal Round up.
DREAMer Application to NYS Bar Granted
The New York State Supreme Court Second Department Appellate Division last Wednesday issued a monumental decision approving the New York State Bar application of Cesar Vargas, the dynamic Co-Director of Dream Act Coalition. Cesar who was brought to the United States from Mexico by his mother when he was 5 years old and graduated from City University of New York School of Law in 2011, is a DREAMer who is authorized to be lawfully present in the United States under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) program. Vargas was initially approved for deferred action in 2013 after DACA was first implemented in 2012.This is the first New York State court decision explicitly holding that a DREAMer law graduate can fulfill the “good character and general fitness” requirements for NY bar admission. Moreover, in a matter of national first impression, the court further found that a DREAMer such as Cesar is not barred from being granted his New York State law license under a federal law prohibiting states from issuing state benefits such as a professional license to undocumented immigrants unless the state first enacted enabling legislation authorizing the issuance of such benefits or licenses. The court held Congress cannot unconstitutionally infringe upon a state’s sovereign authority to divide power among its three co-equal branches of government such as in in New York which has granted the Judiciary branch the authority to review and approve bar applications to practice law, and that the Judiciary may exercise their authority as state sovereign to opt out of such federal restriction as the court did here!
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In response to my previous post, sgeorge326 “wonder[s] how schools can achieve this lofty goal?” of learning “how to identify prospective students or develop admitted ones who understand their life goals and values, and their intellectual and personal gifts well enough to make intelligent decisions around specialization”.
Here are five steps toward that goal AND ideas for achieving them:
1. Encourage students to gain experience in the workplace before attending law school, especially in jobs that expose them to lawyers,.and to reflect on what they learned about lawyers and themselves.
2. Help students understand what lawyers do.
3. Incorporate the work of lawyers into first year courses.
4. Infuse experiential education throughout the curriculum.
5. And, perhaps most important, but still the biggest stretch for most law schools, help students both understand the importance of learning about their life goals and values and intellectual and personal gifts and provide opportunities for them to do so.
As the links in the above paragraphs demonstrate, many schools already one or more of these individual ideas in place. The now ABA-required process of identifying outcomes (Standard 302), including in assessment of student learning both formative feedback and summative grading (Standard 314), and assessing program outcomes (Standard 315) could be implemented in ways that encourage additional student progress in these important areas.
The new volume “Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World” should be available in ebook format from LexisNexis by the end of the month. It includes more ideas and details. Readers, you undoubtedly have additional ideas — share them!
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If you are new to externships or returning to them after being away, I would like to invite you to check out the website created for faculty and administrators of externship programs, LexternWeb. Visit http://lexternweb.law.edu/ for links to all law school externship webpages, materials, and more. Note that the site can always use new, updated, or corrected content. Please send me materials or links for posting. Also, you can subscribe to the Lextern listserv from the site and join 547 other teachers and administrators of legal externship programs in sustained dialogue about externships. For more information, please contact me:
J.P. “Sandy” Ogilvy
Ordinary Professor of Law and
Director-CUA Innocence Project Clinic & Clemency Project,
Director-Law & Social Justice Initiatives,
Director-National Archive for Clinical Legal Education
Columbus School of Law
The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC 20064
Tel: 202-319-6195
Fax: 202-319-4459
http://www.law.edu/faculty/ogilvy/
http://www.law.edu/clinics/cle/InnocenceProj.cfm
Public Interest Blog: http://jogilvy.wordpress.com/
Twitter @SandyOgilvy
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More musings on generalist v. specialist education, and how much doctrine law schools need to teach.
A conversation with one of our University of Washington alums — Leo Flor, Westpoint grad, Gates Public Service Law Scholar, Equal Justice Works Fellow at Northwest Justice Project, and spark plug for the new resource Representing Washington Veterans — has me chewing on whether we need a new understanding of what a “generalist legal education” means.
Leo noted that the JD is often viewed as a relevant generalist credential, even though most law school grads move into traditional bar-passage-required “law practice” jobs. And he observed that many job postings for alternative positions list an MBA or MPA as a relevant qualification, but not the JD.
The traditional generalist education of my era, and to a significant extent still, was intended to teach a set of analytical skills and and expose students to a broad range of legal doctrine potentially relevant to a general practitioner and to passing the bar exam. Though passing the bar remains important and is a significant factor in designing the educational program for lower tier schools, few 21st century lawyers are truly general practitioners.
Perhaps the generalist foundation needed in this era is built on skills, more than doctrinal knowledge. And for Leo’s purpose not only skills in a technician sense. Skills also in a “professional identity” sense. Self-awareness & understanding of ones’ own gifts. Leadership and interpersonal skills. Such an understanding of generalist could make the JD an appropriate credential for the types of job Leo described.
In a previous post, I suggested that that, at least for those students who come to law school with significant self-knowledge and experience, a substantively specialized curriculum could make sense, if combined with the general analytical and research skills to learn new areas. This is not a new idea. Back in 2002 then-law-student Kevin E. Houchen self-published a detailed review of the trend toward certificate programs and concentrations, arguing that for a subset of students such specialization makes sense.
A decade later in 2012 the New York Times touted NYU’s limited moves toward greater specialization not just once, but again in an article promoting specialization for law schools focused on Biglaw.
And in early May of this year 2015 at the National Summit on Innovation in Legal Services sponsored by the ABA and Stanford Law School, speakers reiterated these themes. Richard Susskind (13:08) argued that legal education needs to train graduates for 21sth century jobs like legal project managers, legal process analysts, legal knowledge engineers, and legal risk management. Prof. Deborah Rhode(13.29) observed that it “makes no sense to train Wall Street M &A lawyers the same way we train someone who’s going to be doing routine real estate and divorce work in a small town.”
It is not so very difficult to understand what acting on Prof. Rhode’s observation might mean. As a practical matter, some curricular differentiation based on where graduates will practice already takes place, linked primarily to different levels in the law school hierarchy. Beyond that, many schools offer an extensive enough curriculum – both in doctrine and skills — to permit considerable specialization aimed at traditional law practice niches, even beyond formal concentration tracks and certificate programs.
For more specialized training law schools that offer extensive LL.M. programs routinely allow students to complete an accelerated JD/LL.M in three calendar years. In the tax field, where the LL.M. has long been de rigueur, many schools provide such opportunities, including NYU, the long-time leader in tax LL.M’s. And increasingly, schools educate students not just in substantive tax specialties, but also — using my own school, the University of Washington as an example — with tax-focused skills and clinical training for both JD. and LL.M. students.
My hunch is that increasing numbers of students already opt to specialize, sometimes with a substantive law focus, often combined with a skills focus, e.g. corporate deals with drafting or criminal & tort law with trial advocacy.
Richard Susskind’s challenge is a bigger stretch for legal education, though, again, some initiatives are visible, such as Michigan State‘s Reinvent Law Laboratory.
A key challenge for law schools is to learn how to identify prospective students or develop admitted ones who understand their life goals and values, and their intellectual and personal gifts well enough to make intelligent decisions around specialization. To meet that challenge, a holistic approach to education is needed –whether understood in the MacCrate framework of knowledge, skills and values, or the Carnegie framework of cognitive, professional skills and ethical professional identity apprenticeships.
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices & Setting Goals, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness | Tagged: best practices for legal education, generalist, law school, law schools, leadership, legal education, legal education reform, Maranville, professional identity, reforming legal education, skills, specialist | 1 Comment »
Last week’s ABA e-news discussed “The Relevant Lawyer: Reimagining the Future of the Legal Profession,” a new book from the ABA Standing Committee on Professionalism and Center for Professional Responsibility. Jayne Reardon, executive director of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, is the author of Chapter 19: “Professionalism as Survival Strategy.” Her comments in the ABA article really resonated with me and accord with my sense of how legal professionals can and will evolve. Her recommendations deftly balance the need to embrace change with a commitment to the good lawyering that is fundamental to a just and civil society.
Here are a few samples of her ideas to entice you further:
Instead of trying to get back the slice of the pie that Internet providers have taken, you advocate for lawyers to focus on expanding the services they’re offering to clients. Can you go into detail on that?
I only partly joke that when I was a new lawyer, my primary value was in knowing how to access legal information in an even-then arcane research system. Now anyone who has access to the Internet has access to information—lawyers have lost their monopoly on information. So they need to focus on their value to clients and to society beyond information. Creative solutions are necessary because lawyers have been providing the same types of services for decades, perhaps hundreds of years, but now decreasing numbers of people are finding that those services are worth paying for.
Internet providers process and provide information, but only lawyers with the depth of knowledge and experience can interpret and apply that information to greater and better value for clients. Lawyers can ask questions that get at underlying interests, motivations and other intangibles beyond what a client thinks they may need in filling out a web-based questionnaire. We all can see a great need for advocacy in court, as the number of self-represented litigants continues to rise, so lawyers should address this need and figure out how to benefit the clients and still earn a decent living.
…
You write that diversity and globalization are forcing the legal profession “to provide more holistic advice for clients.” What steps can an attorney take to get ahead of this curve?Globalization has facilitated the dramatic increase in ethnic and racial diversity of our society. For lawyers to get ahead of this curve, they should expand their learning, which will expand their perspectives and decision-making. Take online courses or read outside your area of specialty, even outside the field of law, which will allow you to draw connections and fashion creative solutions. Expand your personal and professional relationships beyond your current circle to include those who are different from you in terms of gender, race, socioeconomic class, political persuasion. In the workplace, challenge others to challenge your thinking and, if you are in management, put together teams that will facilitate “cross-pollination” of ideas and approaches.
I see Jayne Reardon’s wisdom perfectly dovetailing with the engaging work being done on student learning outcomes throughout legal education. Our faculty spent the past year developing our universal Student Learning Outcomes. In a series of workshops we discussed, brainstormed and evaluated the changing role of lawyers along with the longstanding value to clients and society of lawyers’ knowledge, skills, judgment, attitudes and ideals. Like Jayne Reardon, we believe that
“As lawyers adopt new ways to work, think and act, the commitment to professionalism preserves and reinforces their professional identity as lawyers and provides a prescription for competitive advantage.”
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I so appreciated this post over at Legal ED. This semester, I ended my Crim Pro Adjudication class with information from the excellent book The Happy Lawyer. It was a risk since it was my first time teaching this particular course and I was not sure what the students thought of my teaching style…I was elated when a student e-mailed me the following which I post with her permission:
Professor Lynch,
I just stumbled upon this Times article and it reminded me of our brief class discussion about “The Happy Lawyer.” I am pleased to say that Albany Law School, thanks to its incredible alumni connections and location in New York’s powerful Capital Region, has allowed me to dive head-first into the public sector. I could not be any happier— thus far, at least— and figured you’d appreciate a break from reading our exams (while you’re not catching up on VEEP!).
I hope you have a great summer and I will see you in the fall!
OLIVIA ORLANDO
Albany Law School
J.D. Candidate, 2016
Executive Vice President, Student Bar Association SenateThis is the kind of e-mail that confirms my instinct that we are obligated to teach what we know to be true about the professional and personal development of lawyers…..
Some lawyers are happy. Don’t take it on faith; the New York times says so. Of course, other lawyers are not.
One Interesting statistic from the study the story relies on is that associates at high end corporate firms are no happier than their less elite classmates. I was not surprised by this news because once I went on a human rights tour of Central America with several young bright young lawyers doing volunteer political asylum work. All of them were from top San Francisco law firms, and not one of them seemed especially happy in his or her work.
Why aren’t young lawyers holding the most sought after jobs happier in their work? The authors of the study suggest the reason is that the day to day experience of working at a big firm does not score high on the three “pillars of self-determination”– competence, autonomy, and connection to…
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As someone who collaborated on a concurrent session titled “Facing Our Fears in Changing Times” at the AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education, it’s probably not surprising that I was especially drawn to sessions that brought in models or speakers from other disciplines to provide insight on how to operate effectively in the midst of the current period of change in legal education.
In addition to my last post on Michele Weise’s Closing Plenary, in this and my next two posts, I’ll discuss three other provocative sessions that addressed different aspects of this theme.
On Tuesday morning my University of Washington colleagues Jennifer Fan and Lisa Kelly, worked with Rutgers-Newark’s Randi Mandelbaum and Syracuse’s Mary Helen McNeal to introduce the “liberating structures eco-systems model” of leadership. That model views organizational change as an infinity loop
in which organizations move through four cycles that call for different styles of leadership:
Stage Leadership Style
Birth Entrepreneur
Maturity Manager
Creative Destruction Heretic
Renewal Networker
The model suggests that embedded in the cycle are two “traps“:
1. Between the Maturity and Creative Destruction stages lies the Rigidity Trap of “not letting go” of what the organization has birthed and brought to maturity. Staying stuck in the past and wedded to the old ways of doing things.
2. Between Creative Destruction and Renewal lies the Poverty Trap of “not investing enough to accomplish renewal”.
Sound familiar? The session included an exercise where attendees decided which stage they perceived their individual clinic, program, institution, or the clinical legal education movement to be in. Participants then added on the infinity loop diagram post-its with their results. Although responses were spread around the loop, most clustered among Maturity — Creative Destruction — and Renewal. Most responses addressed clinical programs and law schools.
I find this framework a helpful reminder that our current struggles are “normal” and that they won’t last forever. And inspiration to let go of fears and rigidity.
I’m grateful to my former colleague Tim Jaasko-Fisher for his work with liberating structures in the Court Improvement Academy of UW Law’s Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic.
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices and Clinics, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Catalysts For Change | Tagged: clinical conference, creative destruction, disruption, eco-cycle, legal education, legal education reform, liberating structures, Maranville, reforming legal education | 1 Comment »
One of the highlights of last week’s AALS Conference for Clinical Law Teachers was the closing talk by Michele Weise, Senior Fellow, Education at the Clay Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. (A big shout out to Michele Pistone for her role in making that talk happen!) I was superficially familiar with the disruptive innovation thesis, but Weise’s half-hour talk brought to life its relevance to the current moment in legal education in a way that previous exposure had not. Disruptive innovations that shake up a market or industry often follow a predictable pattern, it is argued. The established players in the market target a higher end client base and compete on quality, improving the product and selling it at a high margin. This leaves a significant, low-end segment of the market unserved. New entrants provide an inferior product to these unserved consumers, and gradually improve the product and expand their market. Poof go the established players. Think personal computers, print media, digital cameras, mobile phones . . . . Traditional higher education has long failed to reach a significant segment of potential consumers and the federal government’s shift from financial aid grants to student loans has greatly exacerbated that problem. Arguably, the stage is set for disruptive innovation and on-line technology may be the means to that disruption. The next step of Weise’s analysis was what really captured my attention. She noted that higher education currently serves many functions – transmission of content and certification of knowledge or skills; providing a safe space for young adults to mature socially; networking opportunities, mentoring and tutoring; research & dissemination of scholarship. These functions can be – and are being – disaggregated and provided more cheaply on line. Even the Harvards of the world are potentially at risk, according to Weise. Law schools have traditionally provided a generalist education. As legal practice becomes more specialized, that educational model arguably serves to mask more specialized functions that could be disaggregated. This is already being tried in my home state of Washington with our new Limited Licensed Legal Technician (aka/ Triple LT) program. But lawyers also wouldn’t have to be trained as generalists. As course offerings expand, the potential for moving away from the traditional generalist education does also. Already, this shows up in the transcripts of some of my students who are not necessarily taking the doctrinal courses that were considered foundational in my day. Does this matter? Before hearing Weise’s talk, during the Law Clinic Directors Workshop, I raised the question “how much doctrine do we need to teach?” Good lawyers, I observed, have extensive doctrinal knowledge. (Of course, law schools historically haven’t taught doctrine in connection with the experiential anchor points that many of us need in order to retrieve that knowledge for practice.) Elliott Milstein later challenged the importance of doctrinal knowledge, observing that his clinic students handle their cases well regardless of whether they have taken relevant doctrinal courses. Often true. And yet . . . The counter-example that I didn’t have a chance to share: one of my students recognized that we could challenge a new unemployment compensation statute on the ground that the subject was not properly included in the title of the legislation. A classic case of issue spotting that came about solely because he was taking a Washington State Constitutional Law course. (I didn’t recognize the issue.) A reminder that the ability to issue spot is valuable. But . . . state constitutional law isn’t a classic “foundational” “bar course”. This issue spotting was strictly serendipity – a traditional doctrinally-focused course load would not have accomplished this result. I’m still struggling with the generalist/specialist question. But it leaves me thinking about the potential for niche curricular innovation aimed at students – often older ones who understand their talents, passions and life goals – who come to law school with a commitment to a practice area like criminal law, immigration law, or business law.
I don’t know the answer to these questions. But they strike me as worth investigating.
Filed under: Best Practices, Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change | Tagged: #reformlegaled, disruption, generalist, legal education, legal education reform, reforming legal education, specialist | Comments Off on Disruptive Innovation & the AALS Clinical Conference
It is interesting that of all the professional schools domains, from business, to law, to medicine, to design, to engineering and more, legal education seems to be particularly unexcited with the prospect of turning out lawyers. Why is that? It might have something to do with the straddling of the law school between the higher education academy and the trade school. It is clear, from just rereading what I wrote that the term “trade school” carries baggage with it and likely serving as such is not an attractive idea to many. Thus, we teach students to think critically, but not necessarily the mundane, routinized activities of lawyers. Yet, the actions and performance of lawyers are both important and must coalesce with the thinking agenda. Also, acting or performing without integrity would be more than a distraction, but even a dereliction of duty. So turning out lawyers should be a positive outcome from day #1 of law school – and the practicality of lawyering should be held in high esteem as well as the sometimes disconnected critical thinking.
But what do lawyers make? This question is usually associated with money, but I like it because it also allows for an answer regarding relationships. Lawyers make the rule of law in society, fair processes, dispute resolution more likely and less violent, people who are discriminated against have a way to stand up for their rights, and generally make the our systems function. Lastly, of course, lawyers often make a difference to others. So while lawyers often make nothing tangible, lawyering remains a noble profession that ought to be viewed that way by the academy. The legal education process provides a training and background that offers the tools to navigate the system and help us work together in greater harmony. In an era of uncertainty and volatility, we need competent, community-minded lawyers who operate with integrity.
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As legal education faces new challenges in preparing students for law practice and rethinking the lawyer’s role in society, this year’s AALS Clinical Conference, “Leading the New Normal: Clinical Education at the Forefront of Change,” will focus on the central questions: What is the New Normal? How Should Clinicians Respond to the New Normal? What is the Future of the New Normal?
I am excited to introduce Michele Weise, a Senior Research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation (CCI), as the speaker for the third theme. A former Fulbright Scholar and graduate of Harvard and Stanford, Michelle Weise served as the Vice President of Academic Affairs for Fidelis Education, a professor at Skidmore College, and an instructor at Stanford.
In 2014, Ms. Weise co-authored a book with Clayton Christensen, titled Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution, about how online competency-based education will revolutionize the workforce and disrupt higher education. Ms. Weise’s commentaries and research have been featured in a number of publications such as The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Inside HigherEd, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and USA Today.
The Clay Christensen Institute, ranked in the Thinkers 50 in 2013, is the world’s leading think tank on disruptive innovation. “Disruptive innovation” takes a problem, applies a different set of values to solve the problem, and creates a new market that ultimately overtakes an existing market. Recently, CCI has studied how changes in technology or business models impact industries such as education and health care.
Michele Weise is one of the three main speakers at the conference. In her talk, Ms. Weise will help the audience to understand the theory of disruption and how it relates not only to our own role as clinical professors, but also to outside changes impacting legal education. We see clinical education itself as a form of “disruptive innovation” within the legal academy. Our values and methods now stand ready to overtake and profoundly transform legal education, creating a “new normal.” At the same time, we face the prospect that other innovations (in technology and in law practice) will disrupt us, our schools and legal education as a whole. As part of a focus on the “new normal,” we see a strong need to assess how onrushing innovations in technology and practice will transform our clinics and our schools. I believe that, as a speaker, Michelle Weise offers an important opportunity and perspective for the clinical community and by extension, the legal academy.
Speaking personally, as a student of the CCI’s theories for the last few years, I have found it very helpful to have a broader framework in which to analyze what is happening in legal education. Indeed, my recent article, No Path But One, is grounded in the theories of the CCI, as is another piece on which I am currently working. Others in the legal academy are also applying the CCI’s disruption theory ideas to legal education. See:
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/10/why-institutions-dont-change.html
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2515009
At this critical time in legal education, I think it is important for the legal academy to understand the “why” behind the changes that are happening around us. Ms. Weise will help us as we begin to understand why higher education is changing and provoke us all to think about how we can prepare for the coming years.
The AALS conference will take place in Rancho Mirage, CA from May 3-7, 2015. Registration for the conference can be found here.
I hope to see you there!
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Best Practices for Legal Education 