Equipping Our Lawyers Newsletter Issue #2!

Reporting on Implementation of Summit Recommendations and Related Developments in Legal Education

August 31, 2010

Just Added to the Summit Website! Great Spotlight Article on Georgia's Transition to Law Practice Mentoring Program

See www.equippingourlawyers.org for a detailed and candid look at Georgia's highly acclaimed mentoring program for new admittees by its director, Doug Ashworth. In it Doug details how mentors are chosen and trained and what he has learned in the first five years of running the program a must read for anyone considering how to structure a new lawyer mentoring program.

New Hampshire's Variant on the Bar Exam

The Daniel Webster Scholar Honors program, unique to the University of New Hampshire School of Law (until yesterday the Franklin Pierce Law Center), is a two-year practicum where law students complement their UNH coursework with rigorous applied training in professional skills and judgment through simulated practice, clinical and externship settings.

Webster program participants counsel clients, appear before judges, and develop their skills and judgment in clinical settings. The program offers exposure to numerous fields, including real estate, business, and litigation.

Students who complete the two-year program are certified as having passed the New Hampshire Bar examination, subject only to passing the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE) and the New Hampshire character and fitness requirements. Further, Webster Scholars are eligible to sit for the bar exam in any jurisdiction for which they would otherwise qualify based upon their graduation from an ABA accredited law school.

Initiated in 2005, this innovative program is a collaborative effort of UNH School of Law, the New Hampshire Supreme Court, the New Hampshire Board of Bar Examiners and the New Hampshire Bar Association. For more information, see www.law.unh.edu/websterscholar/.

Lloyd Bond, one of the authors of the Carnegie Report (see the link to it on our website, www.equippingourlawyers.org), has said of the Webster Scholars program. Its two years of what we actually recommended in [the Carnegie Report], integrated in such a way that truly instruction and assessment are indistinguishable.

Ed. Note: The Webster Scholar program illustrates an already in place law school alternative curriculum that incorporates many of the goals and values of Summit Recommendations 1 through 5. CCB

Equipping Our Lawyers Summit Implementation Activity

This August the Summit Steering Committee has further refined action steps for implementing of the Recommendations. Initial priority steps will be as follows:

• Formally submitting the Summit Recommendations to the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar Standards Review Committee.

• Surveying MCLE jurisdictions to see which ones have communications frameworks in place for regulators, providers and lawyers. For those that have no such frameworks now, assist in establishing them as demonstration models in a dozen or more jurisdictions.

• Creating a national working group to develop a model rule for use in distance learning accreditation, including model terms and definitions.

• Researching existing competency models in preparation for a proposal for a long-term multidisciplinary project to develop a model approach to lawyer competencies.

New Context and Practice Law School Textbook Series Echoes Summit Recommendations

Washburn University School of Law Professor Michael Hunter Schwartz has designed the Context and Practice Series of law school casebooks to enable professors to implement the ideas in Best Practices for Legal Education (CLEA 2007) and in the Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Practice of Law (2007). Carolina Academic Press publishes the series. See www.cap-press.com.

Best Practices recommends that law professors set high expectations, engage the students in active learning, give regular and prompt feedback help students improve their self-directed learning skills, employ multiple methods of instruction, and, in particular, use context-based instruction. Educating Lawyers argues that law professors need to do a better job helping students build practice skills and develop their professional identities.

Accordingly, the books in this series, in addition to offering leading appellate decisions:

• Provide resources, such as multiple-choice question banks and essays with answers, designed to make it easier for professors to provide students opportunities for practice and feedback;

• Focus on problem-solving in simulated law practice contexts across a wide range of practices, including both advocacy and transactional practices;

• Include teachers' manuals that make it easy to use multiple methods of instruction and to emphasize active learning;

• Guide students' development of self-directed learning strategies;

• Incorporate learning objectives and doctrinal overviews and situate topics in the law practice contexts in which they arise;

• Include questions that prompt readers to question, reflect, and analyze as they read;

• Provide exercises that require students to reflect on the roles of lawyers and their own professional development;

• Integrate self-regulated learning skills and exercises; and

• Help students to discover links between what they are learning and real life.

The first book in the series is "Contracts: A Context and Practice Casebook" by Schwartz and Denise Riebe. Check out the table of contents and introduction by Prof. Schwartz at www.cap-press.com/pdf/1911.pdf.

Ed. Note: Sounds as if Prof. Schwartz was anticipating Summit Recommendations 1-4 and 15 that seek to encourage law schools to use 21st century teaching techniques and to expose law students to practice related issues and values. CCB

Support the Summit Recommendations--Spread Word of This Newsletter and the Related Website!

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