Issue #6 of Equipping Our Lawyers eNewsletter

Editor's Note: Law school education has never been examined from more angles and by a greater variety of people both in and out of academe than is the case at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

There is considerable ferment from law schools themselves, e.g. the FutureEd project of Harvard Law School and New York Law School, from the American Bar Association and its Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, and from the profession itself as expressed in the Summit Conference held last year by ALI-ABA and ACLEA, the ongoing project of the New York State Bar Association, and the recently announced study funded by the Sidley Austin Foundation and managed by Stanford Law School (see below).

Will real change come of this ferment? I suspect it will. Here's why...

• Technology has changed law students and the practice of law so completely that lawyers and their educators are being forced to radically adjust their approaches.
• The economics of law school education and many traditional law practices are simply unsustainable.
• Generation Y- that huge cohort of Americans between the age of 14 and 29-will not abide by the learning approaches in law school and much of CLE that Baby Boomers and GenXers more or less accepted.

Where will law school education go in the next five, let alone 20, years? While it is too soon to say for sure, my guess is that there will be a healthy variety of new approaches proposed, tried and proven successful in coming years, approaches suggested in the Recommendations of the ALI-ABA/ACLEA Summit and suggested by many others.

The 21st century diversity of students, faculty and administrators will demand new approaches, and the needs of the profession will require them. It promises to be very interesting! What do you think? -Chuck Bingaman, Editor

ABA, Law Students Eye Greater Law School Transparency

The ABA may push law schools to disclose their total costs and placement rates to accepted applicants. The initiative, "Truth in Law School Education," is still in the development stage but may be considered by the ABA's Young Lawyers Division in February.

Similarly, the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar is considering changes to the annual questionnaire that law schools must complete.

Access this link for more details: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202473544557

In addtition, U.S. News & World Report has announced that it will report more employment information regarding law school graduates in 2011, and students
at Vanderbilt Law School have started their own website, www.lawschooltransparency.com, to pursue and share information regarding law school employment rates.

New Focus on Lawyer and Law Student Emotional Well-Being

After 23 years as Executive Director of the Tennessee Commission on CLE & Specialization, Dave Shearon has resigned and founded a Sec. 501(c)(3) called Thriving Lawyers to address the serious issues of lawyer and law student emotional well-being.

Shearon, who completed his MAPP (Master of Positive Psychology) at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, has gradually moved into positive psychology in the workplace with CLE courses on five unique challenges to thriving in the law, law school appearances and teaching resilience skills for the U.S. Army.

Last month, Shearon completed a course at Radyzner Law School in Tel Aviv, Israel on "Positive Psychology for Lawyers."

Thriving Lawyers will soon be announcing initiatives for law schools, law students and practicing lawyers involving distance learning, on-site teaching and related lawyer well-being publications.

Editor's Note: Several studies have shown that practicing lawyers as a group show shocking levels of depression and that lawyers commit suicide in greater numbers than most any other profession.

It's the same with lawyer alcoholism and drug use and it is clear that those disturbing levels of depression begin, for many, in law school. California and other states mandate lawyer training in stress management, but lawyer and law student well-being has, to date, not been a serious concern of many lawyers in academe or in practice.

The Summit Recommendations urge law schools, CLE organizations and in-house providers of CLE to review curriculum offerings to bring them into closer touch with the needed competencies of successful practice.

Dealing successfully with the difficult emotional stresses experienced by students and practitioners may be a necessary part of future law school and CLE curricula. I should disclose that I have consulted with Mr. Shearon on planning Thriving Lawyers as part of my personal CLE management consulting practice. -CCB

Australasia CLE Group Advocating Summit Recommendations

Greg Dwyer, Director of the Centre for Best Practice of The College of Law, Melbourne, Australia, reports that at its annual October conference in Sydney, many of last year's Summit Recommendations were found relevant to felt needs in Australia, New Zealand and other jurisdictions in the group.

According to Mr. Dwyer, if there was one fundamental outcome/recommendation of the conference, it was a consensus, echoing Summit Recommendation 9, that association members must work with and influence mandatory CLE regulators towards a coherent and uniform "voice" on the make-up of MCLE regulations and the measurement of their effects.

On the day prior to the conference, the Centre for Best Practice sponsored an open forum titled "Continuing Legal Education: secret weapon for success and satisfaction in the law, or just another compliance event?"

The catalyst for the forum was the current draft proposal for standardizing CLE regulation across Australia. The current proposal is for mandating 10 hours of CLE per year with certain mandatory core areas (e.g. ethics, management skills).

Stanford, Sidley Launch Study of the Profession

Stanford Law School has launched a three to five year study of changes in the legal profession funded primarily with a $750,000 gift from the Sidley Austin Foundation and Sidley alumni of Stanford.

Faculty, alumni and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business will work on the project and include input of practitioners, managing partners and in-house counsel.

The project will look at changing partner-associate ratios, hourly rates, client expectations, lateral movement, specialization, globalization, technology and more. The school will publish its findings as the work progresses on its soon-to-be-launched web site.

Sidley Austin Executive Committee Chairman Thomas Cole said in a press release that the firm is supporting the program to "ensure a sustainable legal model that serves clients and lawyers." Created in 2006, the Sidley Austin Foundation has provided support to the Legal Aid Society, Equal Justice Initiative and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Legal Educators Address Preparing Practice-Ready Graduates at ALI-ABA/NALP Professional Development Institute

Editor's Note: On December 10 at the ALI-ABA/NALP 2010 Professional Development Institute, a distinguished panel of legal educators spoke to an audience of law firm hiring and training professionals about innovations in law school curricula to teach students the skills needed for practice. Here are a few nuggets gleaned from that panel. -CCB

• Professor William D. Henderson of Indiana University Maurer School of Law reviewed "The Effective Lawyer Study," a 2008 work by UC Berkeley law professor Marjorie Schultz and UC Berkeley psychology Professor Sheldon Zedeik that postulated 28 "success factors" in the practice of law and measured whether and how well the LSAT could predict their presence in
  those that took the test.
  • Findings? LSAT test scores, they said, correlated with only two to eight of Schultz's and Zedeik's practice success factors! And higher college grades and LSAT scores correlated with lower networking skills and a lower propensity for social service!
  • Henderson argued that law schools and, by extension or inertia, law firms overvalue academic indices while undervaluing the actual skills that make real differences in the practice world. And he raised the concern that the lawyer employment market, especially among the large firms that perpetuate academic performance as the be-all-and-end-all criterion for hiring, effectively stunts the growth of new law school approaches that might turn out better equipped lawyers.
  • For alternative views of these important issues in preparing 21st century lawyers, see the blog entry of Charlotte Allen shortly after the Schultz/Zedeik report came out.

• Dean David Van Zandt of Northwestern University School of Law (soon to become President of The New School University) allowed that law schools need to do better jobs with their curricula but also reminded conferees that lawyers' education is really a lifelong job-before, during and after law school.
  
  • He described Northwestern's effort to identify lawyer competencies that law schools should address.
  • In addition to basic legal analysis, Northwestern identified basic teamwork skills, work skills with multi-disciplinary teams, project management (which turns into leadership), basic communications skills (especially teaching students how to talk in a business role with a client), understanding of business strategy, quantitative abilities, and globalization skills.
  • He also noted that Northwestern Law School now seeks two years of work experience before admission, including experience in managing teams or projects.

• Washburn School of Law Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Development Michael Hunter Schwartz described how Washburn's professional values program, among other things, trains students to deal with conflict and to apply critical feedback from peers.
  
  • The program divides students into five-member "law firms," each of which is facilitated by an upper division student for team-based learning.
  • The group process includes peer-based feedback on performance, professionalism, collaboration skills, openness to feedback, applying feedback to future performance, and similar values.
  • The goal is to develop students into self-regulated learners who are better motivated for professional development and growth.

Editor's Note: Panelists Professor Therese H. Maynard (Loyola Law School Los Angeles) and Professor Benjamin Barton (University of Tennessee College of Law) also described their schools' curricular reforms. In addition, the panel and audience candidly discussed the prospects for law firms to consider law students' skills sets, not just GPA, in their hiring decisions.

Summit Recommendations 1-4 encourage law schools to look again at their curricula to determine how they might be updated to better equip law students for 21st century practice. This discussion was a reflection on that process. -CCB

New York State Bar Project on the Profession Moving Forward

NYSBA President Stephen Younger reports that "Since the June kick-off meeting of the New York State Bar Association's Task Force on the Future of the Legal Profession, the Task Force's four subcommittees have been busy drafting a report and recommendations.

They'll focus on creating a roadmap for the future use of technology in the profession, improving legal education and training, establishing proper work/life balance for attorneys, and analyzing the billing structure in law firms."

According to Younger, "Lawyers from firms of all sizes agree that the profession is ready for permanent, positive changes that will allow us to better serve the modern client while shaping a profession that is satisfying to today's lawyers and appealing to future lawyers. In our discussions, there has been broad consensus on many issues.

Clients want fixed and predictable costs and lawyers are willing to look at alternative billing methods, such as value billing, because of efficiency gains, better trained lawyers and the prospect of providing a better balance between work and home life."

At the NYSBA Annual Meeting January 24-29, 2011, the bar has planned several activities related to the future of the profession, including forums for managing partners and law school deans, as well as a Presidential Summit on January 26 that will feature a CLE presentation on the future of the profession.

Click for more on the meeting.

ALI-ABA/ACLEA Summit Update Session Slated for San Francisco

Carole Wagan of Suffolk Law School Advanced Legal Studies will moderate a session called "Summit Update: From Blueprint to Action" on Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at the ALI-ABA/ACLEA Mid-Year Meeting at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

For more information on the meeting, see http://www.aclea.org.