Best Practices for Legal Education

By: Lisa Alexander and Kevin Ramakrishna

A recent article posted on the Albany Government Law Review Fireplace blog discussed practical education versus the Socratic Method.  The post provides a student’s perspective on the different teaching methods and actually supports using the Socratic Method, and sacrificing practical learning to do so. 

On a basic level, I agree with the post.  Theoretical learning does have a place and can be beneficial.  What I do not agree with are the arguments that those who don’t want to utilize or participate in the Socratic Method are mentally weak, or that tradition requires that this Socratic method to be used (especially given that apprenticeships are likely an older and more traditional method).  I thought it might be worth a few minutes to discuss the arguments posited in that post.

The first issue is why, other than “tradition”, the Socratic Method should be maintained.  From what I gather, schools should not value different forms of learning because it only serves the weak minded, and the author supposes that the “weak” would prefer “pure lecture.”  Of course, that isn’t really true.  In fact, one of the author’s own citations will tell you that it is the implementation of the method, not the method itself, which students find insulting and demeaning. James B. Levy, As a Last Resort, Ask the Students: What They Say Makes Someone an Effective Law Teacher, 58 Me. L. Rev. 49,70 (2006).

Additionally, the value of practical education in this post is entirely misunderstood.  There is more to representation than showing up to court in a tie, or knowing what color tie to wear.  Counseling clients is a very different task than understanding a legal theory in a class, but has far reaching ramifications if done poorly.  Responding properly to a judge in an oral argument is not the same as responding to a question in class.  Explaining a legal theory to a partner at a law firm whose profit may be tied to the litigation at hand is a different animal as well.  Perhaps the most important distinction of all, real world ethics are not nearly as cut and dry as they appear to be in the classroom.  Socratic Method style teaching may give a brief taste of these practical skills and scenarios, but there is no substitute for the real thing. If schools can create a more realistic learning environment that will better prepare students for real-life practice then why shouldn’t they?

It is noteworthy that the author agrees that practical education is acceptable in the second and third years of school. Nevertheless, the overall argument seems to dovetail with the proposition that teaching methods require an all-or-nothing approach: either schools teach only the Socratic Method, or only the “practical skills.”  This perspective ignores the possibility of a dual approach.  Why can’t schools teach both theory and practice?  It is crucial that students learn black letter law, the theory behind the law, and the ability to think quickly and creatively.  However, it is also crucial that students know how to apply the law and theory in a real-life setting.  Thus, legal teaching during all three years of law school should focus on developing all of these skills in students.    No matter students’ personal motivations for attending law school, they should be taught both theoretical and practical skills—in other words, an integrated approach to teaching.  This will better prepare them for both their law school and legal careers by teaching them how to think and how to act.

The blog post’s author will be happy to note that the recent Report from the Taskforce on the Future of the Legal Profession states “[w]e do not suggest abandonment of the traditional classroom or a return to the apprenticeship model but rather a more sophisticated model.” 

An individual student’s appraisal and preference for a specific form of education has a place in the debate on legal reform, and the author is certainly not the only advocate of the method. However, the goal of a law school should be to have the best and most prepared students graduate ready, willing, and able to work.  There was a time that law firms were the practical training ground for new lawyers, but those days are largely gone. Thus, it is crucial that we give students the opportunity to develop and hone both practical and theoretical skills before they are thrust out of the bubble of legal education and into the real world of the legal profession.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Is it time to transform the Langdellian core of legal education?  Despite notable calls for change from respected sources, from the Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers, to Roy Stuckey et al.’s Best Practices for Legal Education, the traditional vision of law as an academic science, taught by iconic experts out of casebooks carved up by subject matter, continues to dominate.  Teaching students to “think like a lawyer” sufficed for many decades, even if students were not fully prepared for the practice of law.  That partial preparation is less satisfactory, given the recession and the apparent scarcity of jobs.

An alternative successful educational narrative exists that aligns more closely with training students to improve various skill sets – engaged education.  This term has differing meanings, but for law school, it connotes substantial change in both the form and execution of the education and often includes an active or experiential component, from a field trip, to meetings with the professor, to course-related independent projects.  Some changes include: teaching less around the coverage of substantive material and more for achieving student competencies; focusing class and outside time on a series of student deliverables with a high degree of complexity and frequency, so students are challenged and involved, doing and experiencing outside the classroom as well as in it, all on a regular basis; enlisting students in sharing the responsibility to learn as an on-going process, and not as a sprint just before final exams; and evaluating students by at least several benchmarks, and not just a single, summative final examination.

While what is being proposed here could be called engaged learning, the learning is directed, with specific outcomes sought, so the active and experiential tasks are better described as engaged education. The methodology is designed to enhance specifically framed educational outcomes, facilitate the development of competencies and result in an education that bridges theory and practice, better equipping students for the real-world on the day after their graduation.

So what would this look like? First, it would start right away in the first year of school, especially if it is to affect and reach the core of the educational process.  Without primacy, the message sent will be that experiential, engaged education is secondary to case analysis. Second, the level of engagement would be adjusted to fit the particular context, including the nature of the school, its location, and its students.  Some schools might want engaged components or modules built within courses; other schools might want a single course focusing on engaged learning each semester.  Third, engagement would vary from course to course and year to year.  For example, in a first year Criminal Law course, there could be several engaged or active learning modules.  Students could be required to observe a criminal court case, take a guided tour of the local jail, interview a criminal defense lawyer or prosecutor, or participate in forensic evidence demonstrations.  Property law, on the other hand, could have a single engaged component, such as finding an easement in the community or creating a land sale contract.

The concept of engaged education is accepted and promoted in business and other graduate schools and undergraduate domains, among other educational venues. Should legal education at least check it out, especially as market forces and globalization keep pushing adaptation?

See more like this at: Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Over a year ago, Karen Barton, Michael Hughes and I were at Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire (now University of New Hampshire Law School), working with Professor John Garvey and others on SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Learning Environment) projects.  SIMPLE enables staff to design and run simulations between students, staff and fictional characters.  It facilitates transactional learning between individual students or groups of students and staff.  In legal simulations, students usually play the role of practicing lawyers, though of course they can adopt any role that’s designed into the simulation.  SIMPLE, though, can be used with any client-based professional transaction – it’s been used by disciplines as varied as Architecture and Management Science.

Karen and I have already worked with UNH Law School on the use of Standardized Clients (SCs — for information see our occasional blog & document repository).  SCs are lay people trained to do two things well — role-play a client in an interview, and assess students’ client-facing skills during the course of the interview. We’re using thisassessment process in the training and assessment of students in interviewing.  These students are participating in the Center’s innovative Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program which offers an alternative to the State’s regular Bar examination, and students are admitted upon successful completion of the Program. SCs are already in use in the capstone program; feedback is very positive indeed (as it was in Scotland), and we’re currently analyzing the statistical results of their performance for publication.

On our last visit to New Hampshire, we were helping John to produce two simulations in SIMPLE – one in personal injury and one in civil litigation.  What’s really exciting about this initiative is that John is aiming to combine face-to-face with online simulation by combining SCs with SIMPLE – a world-first in any profession…  SCs will play key roles in SIMPLE simulations, such as clients or witnesses, and will perform the usual roles that they are trained in, namely standardizing role-play and the assessment of student performance.  What we’re doing is fusing two proven methods of simulation to give students a much more immersive simulation experience, while enhancing the formative feedback given to students and retaining standards in summative assessments.  For further information on the Daniel Webster program and use of Standardized Clients at UNH, see John’s paper over at SSRN. We’re aiming for SIMPLE to be used on the Program in fall of 2011, and we’ll be analyzing and writing up the results.

On a broader view, the SIMPLE and SC projects enhance a program that is attempting to move away from conventional US law school education and Bar Examination.  As we all know there is a substantial literature describing 3L disengagement, alienation, boredom, cynicism.  The Daniel Webster Program implements much of the advice in Carnegie and Roy’s Best Practices in order to engage students in the practice of law as well as a critique of that practice.

But there are deeper implications to this pilot.  If SIMPLE and SCs can be used in capstone projects, why can’t they be used in earlier years?  Carnegie acknowledges the power of the case-based method in first year JD pedagogy; but it could be argued that it is precisely because it is so powerful that it requires the balance of experiential learning right from the start.  It’s even possible to go further, and to put a radical case for experiential learning as an example of Lee Shulman’s ‘shadow structure’ in the curriculum – the forms of teaching and learning that are made invisible or weak by the hegemony of the dominant methods (Carnegie, p.24).  Let’s take the radical step and ask why can’t students learn law as if they are inhabiting forms of cultural, ethical and intellectual practice apprenticeships – which is what they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives, after all?  It’s a move that will help to shift student attention from 1L grades and Law Review Editorial Board membership towards the complex human and ethical realities of legal practice – an approach John Dewey would surely approve.

Karen, John and Paul will be presenting the UNH initiative at the third Future Ed Conference in New York Law School in April.  If you’re interested in learning more about either SCs or SIMPLE, see you there!

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Greetings from Doha!  Over the past four days, I have had the privilege of visiting with the Dean and faculty of Qatar University College of Law to discuss Best Practices.  The Dean of the College, Dr. Hassan Okour, has embraced  Best Practices for Legal Education  as well as  the work done by the Carnegie Foundation in Educating Lawyers (Professor Judith Wegner will also visit, in May).    The Qatar college of law has adopted a strategic plan which addresses learning outcomes and teaching methods.  They have introduced  multiple methods of assessment and new  teaching methods. 

 Traditionally, Qatar and other law schools in the region have emphasized the lecture method and in observing classes I noted that their dynamic, energetic and passionate approach is worthy of emulation by those of us in “the states.”  Students actively call out answers in a sort of call and response manner.  Despite this established traditon, the faculty have begun to introduce and experiment with less traditional methods and to extend additional energy in ensuring that their students maximize their potential to develop critical thinking skills during law school.

Concerns  raised by faculty members are remarkably similar to questions raised by faculty in the U.S.:

  Won’t course coverage be sacrificed in introducing small group work or simulations?  

Why must we emphasize practice skills if not all of our grads will practice law? 

And just like in the U.S., other faculty members report better student engagement and increased student motivation  when using more active learning methods.  Meanwhile, the University is focused on graduating Qatari law students prepared for the responsibilities of the new millenium.

   And while female applicants to law school are decreasing in the US, in Qatar, where women  stay close to home during their undergrad years, the college of law is 75% female.  It has been tremendously exciting to see the work being done to better train this new generation of law students!

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Best Practices in Doha, Qatar

By Professor John Nolon, Land Use Law Center at Pace Law School

In its late February article, entitled “As They Ponder Reforms, Law Deans Find Schools Remarkably Resistant to Change,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that law faculty use the “lecture-based model because it is cost-effective and convenient,” quoting Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of University of California’s Irvine School of Law. In the same article, Dean Richard Matasar of New York Law School bluntly states, “[w]e’re all old dogs trying to learn some new tricks, and all of us old dogs have got tenure and we’re not going any place.”

Patty Salkin of Albany Law School and I conducted a teaching survey in the land use law area and found remarkable evidence showing change in teaching skills in recent years.  We suggest that the practical, emotionally-charged, interdisciplinary, and grounded nature of land use, as well as environmental and sustainable development law, make courses on these subjects ideal both for teaching skills and values and for integrating podium and clinical methods of instruction. (See Practically Grounded: Convergence of Land Use Pedagogy and Best Practices, Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 60, Number 3, February, 2011, at p. 519.)  Our survey shows that the trend toward teaching practice skills in traditional doctrinal courses is underway, at least in the land use classroom.

Deans and professors are focused on this issue in part because the American Bar Association is planning to add “student learning outcomes” to the process of accrediting law schools.  Drafting new rules for schools to follow has been delegated to the ABA’s Student Learning Outcomes Subcommittee.  This six-member group is charged with the controversial task of determining the rules that schools must follow to determine and measure the skills that law students should have upon graduation. For further information on these accreditation issues see The National Law Journal of Feb 22, 2011.

Pace and Albany Law Schools are sponsoring a conference on this topic. On May 5^th, nearly a dozen land use and environmental law professors from law schools across the country will present their skills and values teaching models. Additionally, our resident experts will facilitate extensive discussions regarding best practices for teaching practice skills to students in upper division courses.  High on the list of discussion topics are the time practice teaching takes, class size issues, and the concern over lost doctrinal coverage.  Please click here for conference information if you are interested in attending.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Practically Grounded – Embracing Skill and Values Teaching in Land Use, Environmental, and Sustainable Development Law Classes

Professor Ralph L. Brill was kind enough to send us his memo to the American Bar Association RE: Comments On The Proposed Changes To The American Bar Association Standards Concerning Tenure And Job Security.

Professor Brill has taught for over 50 years at Chicago Kent College of Law.  Due to the length of the memo (18 pages) it would be unwieldy to post in its entirety, but you can read it at the link above.

I will, however, provide a small preview which will explain the thought process behind the memo:

Dear Dean Polden:

 

Enclosed is a memo I felt I needed to write, dealing with the proposed changes in the A.B.A. Standards as they deal with tenure and security of position. I would appreciate if it is made available to the other members of the Standards Review Committee before its next meeting. I apologize for the length of the memo, but I felt it necessary to respond to your and Dean Matasar’s presentations at the A.A.L.S. meeting, where I heard for the first time the underlying reasons for the proposed changes.

I appreciate greatly the work you and the committee are doing. But I feel I must join the critics of the proposals. There is no opportunity at the committee meetings, nor will there be at the open forum that will be held at a subsequent meeting, to speak to the issues, so I felt the need to join those who filed their thoughts in memo form.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The New York State Bar Association released the report from the Task Force on the Future of The Legal Profession last week.  While the report covers a broad range of topics, the topics of interest here concern Educating and Training New Lawyers which includes: new assessment and training techniques, preparing students to practice, and helping lawyers form a professional identity.

It is understood that the requirements of the Bar and the curriculum in law schools must align, but there is a growing concern that the Bar should also meet the requirements of practice.  Today, almost every law school has some clinical programs. The Bar exam, however, does little to test practical areas of the law but instead seem to rely on mandatory CLE to aid new attorneys in their transition to practice.  This discussion is just beginning, but the NYSBA should be involved in discussions with practitioners who have trained new attorneys to develop a plan to prepare and assess new attorneys. 

In order to create an adequate training curriculum, traditional learning may have to be sacrificed to some degree.  As it stands, the New York Court of Appeals requires that not more than 20 hours of law school work can be spent in clinical courses.  While there is no doubt that traditional law school classes are important, there are aspects of professionalism that must be learned in a practical setting.  If the courts are complaining about the professionalism of new attorneys, which they occasionally do, then it is imperative that a more lenient rule apply for skills courses or that certain skills courses be mandatory.  The strict limitation does have a draw back: stigma.  Even if twenty hours is enough time to properly develop a professional identity, most students are not going to take the full amount under the mistaken conclusion that such courses are not valuable.  To that end, Capstone courses should be encouraged.  Capstones have been discussed on this blog in the past, and such courses would go a long way toward integrating practice and traditional coursework. 

In order to be successful at recrafting the Court of Appeals’ rules, the Taskforce also endorses that the NYSBA participate in the Model Competencies Project which continues the work of the MacCrate Commission.  The goal is to understand the blend of skills and values and determining what is “practice-ready” for new attorneys. 

One of the recent developments in Bar requirements nationwide has been mandatory mentoring, which this blog has posted about in the past (here and here).  The Taskforce finds that such programs should be explored in New York based upon the success in Utah, Georgia and South Carolina.

Overall, the Taskforce Report is a call for the NYSBA to adopt new standards that will create lawyers that are better prepared to practice.  The ideas stem from Best Practices, The MacCrate Report and Carnegie, so they are not necessarily new ideas, but they are concepts that are gaining tractions elsewhere.  By pooling the resources of law firms and academicians, the NYSBA will be able to craft rules that provide students with the needed skills to be valuable to employers.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on NYSBA Task Force on the Future of the Legal Profession Report

This post is a “shout-out” to Commercial Law professors and their colleagues who are proud of them.  I will be visiting the Qatar University College of Law in March and presenting to the law faculty  on Best Practices.  I have learned that the faculty and students there are particularly interested in Commercial Law-related examples.  Thus if anyone has some good examples, referrals, links, or suggestions related to active learning exercises in the commercial law area, please tell us about them here or  send me an e-mail at mlync@albanylaw.edu.  Thanks !

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Using Active Learning Techniques in Commercial Law Classes?

Total Fail: It Happens http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/total-fail-it-happens/30640
By Heather M. Whitney

Be careful what you wish for. The other day, my husband, who is also in science, and I were talking about what qualities of a scientist we hope to model for our students as a part of our everyday interactions with them. High on our list was the ability to acknowledge that sometimes we’re not always at the top of our game. We don’t go around describing nature in perfect equations. Science, like all disciplines, is the pursuit of characterizing and understanding the as-of-yet unknown. It’s a process, not a life of looking up answers in a solutions manual.

Guess what happened the very next day in class? I was teaching my general physics course, covering (what I think to be) a very fascinating study in where an electron will be as it approaches a negatively charged sphere, at the point when the velocity is half its original value. (Trust me, it really is interesting.) On the board I modeled the problem solving approach for the students, talking about conservation of energy and how it motivated the solution. I came to next-to the-last step of the solution, the mathematical equivalent to a joke’s setup for the punchline. And it was gone. I mean, GONE. For whatever reason, I completely lost track of what to do. My notes were no help, because of course the final steps were crystal clear during my prep and I did not feel the need to write them out. After all, this is the fourth time around I’ve taught this course, right?

There were about ten minutes to go in class. I swallowed my pride and made the decision to end class a bit early, with the promise of opening up the next with the finished solution. There were of course many options I could have taken, such as letting the students work in groups to finish up the solution and then comparing options as a class. In my best moments, I would have even created a clicker question on the fly so that students could vote for which proposed solution was the “best.”

But I didn’t. At the time, I felt it was best to just leave it and come back to it. And that’s what happens in the life of a real scientist. Sometimes we get stuck. We don’t know what steps to next take and we leave the problem for a bit – get a cup of coffee, stare out the window, read some email. Sometimes we even lay problems aside for days (or weeks or years!) Then we come back to the problem and attack it some more.

Two days after, the next class period, I had a brief discussion with my students about how that situation mirrored what often happens in real life. We want to model for our students what we think is the best of being in our field – the beautiful solution to a problem. But we need to also model for them how to handle challenges, and part of that is maintaining a healthy bit of humility.

Have you ever had a total fail during class? How did you handle it? Did you get any student feedback? Let us know in the comments.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I imagine some of the readers of this blog have opinions as to what makes a good teacher’s manual.  Here’s a chance to express yourself in a poll on the Faculty Lounge blog. Voting is open until February 16 at noon.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on The Teacher’s Manual – What Is Important?

Although emotions are intertwined with most conflicts and much of what comes to law offices has some sort of emotional content, law schools tend to teach law students about how to deal with clients’ emotions (and their own), similarly to the way many lawyers in practice handle emotions, by avoiding the topic.

While Best Practices acknowledges the importance of emotional content, it is between the lines, not explicit. In Chapter 5A2b(3), there is a section titled “Help students develop interpersonal and professional skills,”  but even in that section the focus is on cognitive, not affective skills.

Acknowledging and responding well to emotions is a critical part of building rapport and developing relationships of trust across all helping professions, including law practice.  The professional relationships between lawyers and their clients provide the foundation for gathering accurate information and being able to effectively represent clients.  We know from surveys of clients that the relationship between lawyers and their clients is more important to clients’ satisfaction than winning cases.  If we are not teaching the value of acknowledging emotions are we doing a disservice to our students?

Recent research on the brain and therapy interventions indicates that when people can name the emotions they are feeling, they perceive that they are more in control of these emotions.  The process of naming emotions relocates the emotions to the left side of the brain which is more linear and language based than the right side.  The right side is thought to be more artistic and associated with depression and some other emotional content.  Research has also found that when people are able to help others name their emotions there is a positive influence on the development of the relationships.

It may be important for lawyers and law students who fear out of control emotions to realize that they are in the greatest risk of having emotions flare when they ignore emotional signals.  Learning to acknowledge and reflect feelings actually moves them into a more controlled place.

How does this relate to love? Don’t all emotions have some relationship to love, either as variations of positive feelings or through the loss or absence of love?  Can we be betrayed except by someone we liked and trusted? Does it matter if we are disrespected if there was no desire for respect?  Might not the family that is mired in conflict be as bound to each other in their loss of love as they were in their first blush of love, only in the opposite direction?  Learning to acknowledge and appreciate the capacity of humans for experiencing emotions, positive and negative, can be seen as basic to working in a helping profession.  I believe law is a helping profession and that law students would benefit from learning to acknowledge and respond to emotions as part of their preparation for law practice

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

As a recent post indicated, Oregon is now requiring mandatory mentoring for new attorneys , a concept that is certainly supported here on Best Practices.  We also know that Oregon is not the first state to enact mentoring as part of admission to the Bar.  We think it is worth providing a place to briefly discuss how Georgia, Utah, and South Carolina are establishing mentoring programs.

Georgia was the first state to make mentoring mandatory, and has become the model for mentoring.  The Transition into Practice Program took effect on January 1, 2006 following a decade of work.  The Transition into Law Practice Program combines a mentoring and a CLE component.  The CLE component   “lays the groundwork for and supports the mentoring component . . . Most beginning lawyers will attend an Enhanced Bridge-the-Gap Program that combines a day of introduction to law practice with a second day of instruction.”

Three types of mentoring are available.  If the new lawyer practices in a firm or organizational setting, he or she will have an “inside mentor” from that practice.  If the new lawyer does not practice with other lawyers (for instance, is a sole practitioner), he or she will have an “outside mentor”—someone who works outside of the new lawyer’s office.  Group mentoring is available when the new lawyer is unemployed or does not work in a legal setting.  Some firms, government agencies, and other organizations have developed their own “Master Mentoring Plans” that they use for all newly admitted attorneys subject to the Transition Into Law Practice Program.  If an employer has such a plan, then the mentor and mentee need not create and submit a written mentoring plan.

The only activity that mentees must complete (in the mentoring context) is the Advocacy Experience, and only if they appear as sole or lead counsel in Georgia’s Superior or State Courts in a contested civil case or a criminal trial.  In addition, mentoring activities and experiences may be created to best suit the needs and circumstances of the mentor and mentee.  However, the plan must include:

1. Regular contact and meetings between the mentor and beginning lawyer.
2. Continuing discussions between the mentor and beginning lawyer on at least the following topics: (a) Ethics and professionalism. (b) Relationships with clients, other lawyers (both in and outside the firm), the judiciary and the public, including unrepresented parties. (c) Professional work habits, organizational skills and practice management.(d) Economics of practicing law in the relevant practice setting. (e) Responsibility and opportunities for pro bono work, bar activities, and community service.
3. Introduction to the local legal community. 
4. Specific planning for professional development and continuing legal education in and outside the firm. 
5. Periodic evaluation of the mentor-beginning lawyer relationship.

If the lawyer fails to complete the mentoring program within one year, he or she must complete an approved Rehabilitation Plan or attend a session of the State Bar’s Ethics School.

The Utah approach, called the New Lawyer Training Program is very similar to the Georgia approach and even includes the same three kinds of mentoring.  However, Utah provides fewer guidelines for mandatory activities. For instance, working with clients is mandatory, while negotiation is elective.  For both mandatory and elective subjects, new lawyers have a variety of activities that they either must or may complete.  For instance, the Model Plan states that in the required ‘working with clients’ section, the mentor must “[t]rain, through discussion and client interaction, how to screen for, recognize, and avoid conflicts of interest,” and may “[t]rain on how to decide whether to accept a proffered representation.”  After the mentor and new lawyer develop a particularized mentoring plan, they must submit it for approval by the NLTP program administrator and the New Lawyer Training Committee.  Once the plan is approved, the new lawyer has 12 months to complete the NLTP.  A sample plan can be found here.

In 2008, the South Carolina Supreme Court created the Lawyer Mentoring Second Pilot Project.  All new lawyers, even those who are currently unemployed, must register for the Project.  New lawyers are free to choose their mentors from within their firm or agency, or they may choose outside counsel.  South Carolina’s Uniform Mentoring Plan is designed differently than Utah’s and Georgia’s.  Rather than mandatory and elective subjects or tasks, South Carolina has nine objectives that the new lawyer must meet, including “establish[ing] a clear understanding as to the expectations of both the mentor and the new lawyer.”  The Uniform Mentoring Plan lists suggested means for achieving these objectives and acts as a guide for mentors and mentees to structure individual mentoring programs.

While mentoring programs have not existed for very long, participants have generally responded positively to the experience. Shapiro Research Group conducted a telephone survey at one-year intervals during Georgia’s two-year Pilot Project.  The survey revealed that about “approximately 85% of both the mentors and beginning lawyers rated the Pilot Project as satisfactory in varying degrees.”  The Committee on the Standards of the Profession noted that on professionalism measures, such as dealing with clients, the new lawyer’s self-perceptions of their skills matched the perceptions of their mentors.  Additionally, “the beginning lawyers’ rating of their ability to handle the ethical aspects of law practice increased consistently from the baseline over the course of the Pilot Project. This was also true for dealing with other lawyers, judges and court personnel.”

The Schapiro Survey also revealed that new lawyer’s self-perceptions were positive, and career satisfaction increased over the course of the Pilot Project.  At the end of the second year, “60% of the group rated themselves ‘very satisfied’ with their legal careers.”

So what do you think about these programs? Will mentoring be the new norm over the next decade?

Thank you to Lisa Alexander for helping with the background research on these programs.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

According to a recent article on Law.com (password required), newly admitted attorneys in Oregon will be required to undergo a new, yearlong mentorship program which “requires new attorneys to pair up with experienced practitioners who will offer monthly guidance on everything from ethics and professionalism to the inner workings of a transactional or litigation practice.”  It will go into effect for February Bar takers.  The article notes that Oregon is the third state to make mentorship a part of the formal education requirements for admission to the Bar. Soon, Wyoming will become the fourth.

The program will require applicants to complete 2 hours of mentoring a month, which can be completed at the firm in which they work.  There is also some flexibility in how the program is handled by private firms, a move that responds to the more rigid Utah program.

While the new plan is not without detractors, supporters argue that in the current economy, mentorship is a must.  They point out that, in the past, “‘You would graduate law school, get a job at a firm and people there would serve as mentors,’ . . . ‘Now, there are so many people who can’t get firm jobs and are hanging out their shingle. We’re trying to connect them with the professional side of the job and teach them the culture – teach them how to be civil, how to network and introduce them around at the courthouse.’”  Detractors are mainly concerned about another cost to bar applicants for administrative costs of the program.  It is not clear what the cost will be, but the article states that Oregon foresees a $100 fee.

The mentor program is a good idea.  As has been mentioned here many times before, students should be prepared to use their J.D. for their own profit.  It is understood that schools cannot teach everything, so even where Best Practices is followed, a mandatory mentorship would provide for a proper transition into the professional world.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Mandatory Mentoring for New Attorneys in Oregon