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Greg Miarecki

Do These PIF Courses Really Matter?

By: Greg Miarecki, Executive Assistant Dean for Career Planning and Professional Development, Director of the University of Illinois College of Law Leadership Project, University of Illinois College of Law

Each spring semester, I teach our professional identity formation class, known as Fundamentals of Legal Practice.  A good number of our students speak positively about the class.  But each year, there are always a series of comments in the course evaluations along the lines of, “Why do I have to take this?  This is a waste of time.  I’d rather spend more time learning about constitutional law or contracts.”  For years, I was pretty disappointed in this kind of response (even if it was a minority view).  Then, several years into my PIF journey, I was at a Holloran Center retreat and learned that many of you who teach these classes get the same response.  That support allowed me to take these kinds of comments with a grain of salt, continually reminding myself that my 25 years in the legal profession equipped me with skills and insights that brand new law students simply don’t have.

And, over the years, I get some support from unexpected sources.  Last week, I was meeting with a Chicago firm – a senior partner and a junior associate. The junior associate graduated from our law school and took Fundamentals.  At the outset of the meeting, the partner talked about what he wanted in junior lawyers – he needed responsiveness, focus on client service, someone who could build relationships, and be a leader – all things we talk about in Fundamentals.  I chuckled a bit, turned to the junior associate and asked her if she’d ever taken a class focusing on those kinds of things.  She looked at me quizzically for a moment, and then said, “Oh, that nonsense we listened to in 1L year” – clearly referring to our Fundamentals class.

The partner, intrigued, asked me to explain.  I told him about what we taught in the class, and he enthusiastically responded that he loved the idea of the class.  We both looked at the junior associate, who looked a bit confused and then sheepishly admitted, “I actually wish I had paid more attention to some of those sessions.”

Some of our students will “get it” right away.  Some will eventually get it, perhaps years into the future.  And some might never get it.  If you ever need reinforcement and support for your PIF initiatives, just talk to alumni and employers – many of them appreciate what you’re doing!

If you would like to share your PIF successes or commiserate, then please connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at miarecki@illinois.edu.

November 16, 2023 by
Kendall Kerew

Holloran Fellow Kendall Kerew Recognized by American Bar Foundation

By Felicia Hamilton, Holloran Center Coordinator

Holloran Center Fellow Kendall Kerew, who is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of Externships at Georgia State University College of Law, was recently appointed a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). This appointment recognizes “exemplary dedication to the highest principles of the legal profession, commitment to the welfare of society, and support for the ideals, objectives, and work of the American Bar Foundation.”

The ABF supports research used by institutions and individuals to shape laws, guide policy decisions, and foster social change toward greater dignity, fairness, and justice. The ABF Fellows is an international society honoring members of the legal profession who have shown outstanding dedication to these principles. Kerew exemplifies these values through her teaching, research, and service.

We offer our warmest congratulations to Kendall on this much-deserved recognition. We are proud to have her as a Holloran Center Fellow!

November 7, 2023 by
Barbara Glesner FInes

American Bar Association Difference Maker Award Recognizes PIF Program

By Felicia Hamilton, Holloran Center Coordinator

At its annual fall meeting, the ABA Solo, Small Firm and General Practice Division’s (GPSolo) recognized Holloran Center Fellow Barbara Glesner Fines with its Difference Maker Award.   The Award recognized Dean Glesner Fines’ leadership in developing a solo and small firm program at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law.  This program is explicitly designed as a professional formation opportunity in which students are guided in envisioning themselves as entrepreneurial lawyers and are required to prepare a business plan and portfolio for their solo or small firm practice.

That program, first developed with Dean Emerita Ellen Suni and Professor Tony Luppino in 2004, serves those students who have a goal of entering solo or small firm practice upon graduation.  More than simply a law practice management course (though that is an important component in building their plan), the course helps students to identify and demonstrate their unique value to the community.  Students articulate the values that will guide their practice.  They learn about the business of law and the professional guideposts.  Their portfolio provides details of financing, equipment, software, staffing, insurance, and more.

To help guide students in preparing their portfolio, the program faculty work closely with members of the bar and professional support service providers to provide expertise, coaching, and mentoring.  The primary course is held during the summer and includes student participation in the Missouri Bar Solo & Small Firm Conference.  At the conference, students meet solo practitioners in their preferred fields of practice and geographic areas.  Students share their portfolios and pitch their business plans to attorneys for critique, attend continuing education sessions, visit with vendors of support services, and meet members of the Missouri Supreme Court and leadership of the Missouri Bar.

Alumni of the program have launched a variety of very successful solo and small firm practices, many of them by starting in the law school’s post-graduate incubator.  These have included solo practices focusing on a highly specialized fields, general practices in rural and underserved communities, innovative nonprofit law firms, practices focusing on innovation or technology, and highly successful solo and small firms across a wide range of practice areas.  Graduates from even a decade ago report that they still revisit and revise their original business plan prepared during law school. These alumni, in turn, guide the next generation of solo and small firm attorneys.

The program is an example of collaboration in building a professional identity formation program to successfully help students in their transition from student to lawyers.  Congratulations to Holloran Fellow Barbara Glesner Fines and her colleagues on making a difference with this program.

To learn more about the solo & small firm program or to share your own experience with similar programs, contact Professor Glesner Fines at glesnerb@umkc.edu.

 

Barbara Glesner Fines is the Dean and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

Barbara Glesner Fines is the Dean and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

October 26, 2023 by
Barbara Glesner FInes, David Grenardo, Jerome Organ, Louis Bilionis, Neil Hamilton

Standard 303 and the Development of Student Professional Identity: A Framework for the Intentional Exploration of the Profession’s Core Values

 

By Felicia Hamilton, Holloran Center Coordinator

Holloran Center Directors Neil Hamilton, Jerry Organ, and David Grenardo, along with Holloran Center Fellows Barbara Glesner Fines and Louis Bilionis recently co-authored an article that supplies a framework for understanding the core values of the legal profession. The authors’ intention is to guide legal educators into a thoughtful exploration of the nature of these values, and to encourage law school faculty and staff to make intentional choices around how their programs highlight them. Using the metaphor of a tree, the authors address the core values of the “trunk” (a sense of responsibility to those whom the professional serves and the commitment to professional development) and the “branch” values as codified into the Model Rules.

Read more in the abstract for “Standard 303 and the Development of Student Professional Identity: A Framework for the Intentional Exploration of the Profession’s Core Values” below:

Legal educators, following the change in ABA accreditation Standard 303(b)(3)[1], must face directly the question “what are the core values of the legal profession?” This article offers a framework both to help faculty and staff clarify their thinking on what are the profession’s core values and to spotlight the choices law schools need to consider in purposeful fashion.

The framework offered here should also help allay two concerns that faculty, staff, and students may have about core values of the profession.  One concern is that all statements of values are subjective in the sense that they are expressions of individual subjective preferences, beliefs, and attitudes.[2]  A second concern is that statements of values tend to privilege the traditional, and hence fail to reflect the diversity of the profession and the experience and views of marginalized members of the profession – particularly with respect to the elimination of bias, discrimination, and racism.[3]

On the first concern, the article analyzes first the core values of all the service professions to point out two core values foundational to all of them. The article then analyzes the legal profession’s core values articulated in the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, adopted with some variation by all fifty states. The fifty-state adoption of the Model Rules indicates a strong consensus on the core values of the profession.  On the second concern, the values framework offered here makes clear that elimination of bias, discrimination, and racism is among the profession’s core values, and that the profession should, on an ongoing basis, seek feedback widely regarding its core values, particularly from marginalized groups, and reflect on the feedback.

Part II outlines the ABA accreditation Standard 303 changes that require each law school to help students develop a professional identity through the intentional exploration of the values of the profession. This means the faculty and staff need to discern the values of the profession they want the students to explore.  Part III analyzes what is a professional identity?  Part IV provides a framework to help legal educators clarify their thinking about the profession’s core values.  The framework features some widely shared fundamental values for all the service professions, and locates also values particular to the legal profession. Part V explores how the core values of the profession in part IV connect to “successful legal practice.”  Part VI discusses cautionary arguments that traditional values like those in the Model Rules can privilege some groups and fail to account for the experiences and viewpoints of marginalized groups.

[1] Standards & Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, Standard 303(b)(3) (Am. Bar Ass’n 2023), [hereinafter Accreditation Standards], https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/standards/2023-2024/23-24-standards-ch3.pdf.

[2] See, e.g., Joseph Singer, Normative Methods for Lawyers, 56 U.C.L.A. L. Rev. 899, 902-911 (2009).

[3] See discussion in Part VI of this article.

You can download the article from SSRN here.

Neil Hamilton is the Holloran Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota.

Jerome Organ is the Bakken Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law

David Grenardo is a Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

Barbara Glesner Fines is the Dean and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

Louis Bilionis is the Dean Emeritus and Droege Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.

October 24, 2023 by
David Grenardo, Felicia Hamilton

Debunking the Major Myths Surrounding Mandatory Civility for Lawyers Plus Five Mandatory Civility Rules That Will Work

By Felicia Hamilton, Holloran Center Coordinator

David Grenardo, Associate Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, recently won the prestigious Warren E. Burger award for his essay “Debunking the Major Myths Surrounding Mandatory Civility for Lawyers Plus Five Mandatory Civility Rules That Will Work.” This award honors research that contributes significantly to the field of professionalism, civility, ethics, and excellence.

Building on his previous scholarship on the importance of civility in the legal profession, Grenardo tackles common misconceptions that prevent widespread standardization and proposes five rules for holding lawyers accountable to practicing civility with colleagues, clients, and opposing counsel.

Read the abstract below:

Civility remains a problem in the legal profession. Teaching law students about civility is important, if not critical, but it is not enough. Entertaining CLEs on civility for lawyers make for a fun hour, but they also fall short. Calls for civility and calls to return to civility have become routine, yet they can ring hollow. Adding phrases about civility to the oaths lawyers take to practice sounds wonderful, but those oaths oftentimes lack accountability. Recognizing that our country is divided and toxic in the way we communicate with each other is accurate, but that similarly fails to solve the problem. And most of all, we are naïve to hope that some lawyers will make significant changes to their behavior in a profession riddled with systemic incivility just because others in the legal profession kindly ask them to do so. Systemic change requires significant changes to the system.

Part I of this Article provides an overview of civility in the legal profession. Part II describes mandatory civility in the legal profession. Part III raises the major myths of mandatory civility and responds to each of them. Part IV includes proposed mandatory civility rules, while Part V sets forth arguments against mandatory civility and responds to those arguments. This Article concludes that mandatory civility rules are necessary and practicable.

How many more calls to civility must we endure as civility continues to decline in society and the legal profession? How long will the legal profession continue to pay lip service to civility while the negative effects of incivility continue to plague the profession? Talking is not enough—leaders of the legal system need to act. State bars, state supreme courts, and, if necessary, state legislatures must take the step that four brave states already have—mandate civility.

Download the full article from SSRN here.

 

Felicia Hamilton is the Coordinator for the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

David Grenardo is a Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

October 12, 2023 by
Christopher Corts

How to Make PIF Assessments More Accurate, Bias-Resistant, and Motivational for All Students

By: Christopher Corts, Professor of Law, Legal Practice, University of Richmond School of Law

To be a lawyer is to be a member of a learned profession that society entrusts with the privilege of self-regulation.[1] To fulfill their duties to society, lawyers must be effective lifelong learners. All knowledge workers, but especially lawyers, must be prepared for a career that includes lifelong learning.[2]

If being a lawyer necessarily means being a lifelong learner[3], then teaching law students the skills, values, and competencies they need to learn now to keep learning on their own for the future is an inescapable part of any law school’s educational mission. Within American law schools, one of the most important places where we collectively attend to the burdens and joys of teaching students how to identify and internalize their commitment to lifelong learning as part of their identity has been the recent movement toward education for Professional Identity Formation (PIF).

Neil Hamilton has articulated PIF’s educational mission as including “two foundational norms and values that law students and lawyers must understand, internalize, and demonstrate,” one of which is “a commitment to pro-active continuous professional development toward excellence at all the competencies needed to serve others well in the profession’s work”[4] (emphasis added).

When we embrace this learning objective as part of our PIF instruction, it raises important questions about how we ought to assess students in this work. If your school has adopted a form of assessment that includes grading, I want to suggest three goals that your program ought to adopt as you design assessments for PIF-related skills and competencies.

In a fascinating, content-rich book entitled Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms,[5] Joe Feldman—a graduate from Stanford, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and NYU Law School[6]—argues any system of grading ought to be accurate, bias-resistance, and motivational for every student-learner.[7]

Feldman suggests that a system of grading that is more accurate would be one that uses “calculations that are mathematically sound, easy to understand, and [able to] correctly describe a student’s level of academic performance.”[8] As applied to law school, this suggests that we need to take care to ensure that our calculations and descriptions of a student’s level of performance is made by reference to a professional standard of competence or excellence for any particular learning outcome that we publish to students and aim to teach.

This focus—on grading students by reference to professional standards of competence or excellence—is what educational literature calls criteria-referenced forms of grading. The biggest obstacle to accuracy thus defined is the law school curve, which eschews criteria-referenced assessment by imposing norm-referenced assessment.[9] Unfortunately, most law schools impose a curve, which means they remain committed by policy to using inaccurate forms of grading!

As a system of grading, a curve is a norm-referenced form of assessment—not a criteria-referenced assessment. By design, a curved grade communicates information about a student’s performance relative to the performance of other students measured in the same group (the norm). When a law student receives their curved grade, they are like a child who visits the pediatrician and gets feedback about the size of their head being, say, 99th percentile. Does this assessment mean they are healthy or intelligent? It’s impossible to say based on the number. The number is an expression of how the child compares to others within his or her group. It says nothing about how the child measures against standards of health or intelligence.

Being a norm-referenced assessment, a curved law school grade suffers from these same flaws. It is inaccurate in the sense that it cannot directly communicate anything about professional standards of competence and excellence. It is not designed to do that.

But as Feldman shows: the curve is so much worse than just being inaccurate. It is also prone to bias and can be de-motivational to students all along the contours of the curve.

Feldman outlines myriad ways that curving harms students by running afoul of all three of the fundamental values identified in the book. Even so, he suggests some helpful ways that we can work within the curved system to create assessments, including graded inputs, that are more accurate.

For example, Feldman suggests that teachers should:

  • Resist giving a “zero” as a grade when work has not been submitted. That gives students the option of not doing work! Good, poor, or in-between, a grade given ought to represent a teacher’s judgment about the degree of quality of work submitted, not a judgment about when it was submitted.
  • Grade minimally. The proper focus ought to be on giving feedback without grades attached. The more we grade, the more students obsess about the grade. We need them to obsess about the quality of their performance relative to professional standards of competence or excellence. That requires feedback.
  • Use a small grading scale from numbers 0-4. A small grading scale properly conveys the relative degrees of difference that separate levels of achievement along the ways to excellence. All students should expect to pass between those levels on the way to competence and, eventually, excellence. [As an avid tennis player and recent convert to pickleball, I appreciate the way that both sports use a rating system that is small-scale and incremental in the ways Feldman describes. For example: A beginning tennis player (2.5 or 3.0) is distinct from an intermediate (3.5 or 4.0) and more advanced players (4.5, 5.0 +). But the size of the rating scale adopted facilitates a growth mindset; it reinforces the belief that, with sustained attention, effort, and practice, it is possible to move up the rating scale over time.]
  • Give more weight to more recent performance. A student’s performance early in the semester—before there has been much instruction, practice, or feedback—is predictably poorer for everyone.
  • Grade based on individual achievement, not an entire group. This has implications for grading team-based assignments, obviously. But it also warrants against using a curve—because the curve reflects individual performance only by reference to the group’s norm, not by reference to professional standards or criteria for competence, excellence, whatever).[10]

So once we have tackled accuracy….how might we ensure our grading is more bias-resistant? When Feldman talks about bias-resistant grading, he means that “grades should be based on valid evidence of a student’s content knowledge, and not based on evidence that is likely to be corrupted by a teacher’s implicit bias or reflect a student’s environment.”[11]

Sounds reasonable. But how might we make grading more bias-resistant in these ways? Feldman gives a few suggestions; I suspect they might be surprising to some of my instructor-readers who likely have used one or more of the disfavored practices Feldman identifies as being prone to bias. Feldman argues we should:

  • Grade based only upon required content. Among other implications, this means that we ought to resist any temptation to award extra credit.
  • Make sure the final grade reflects the quality of work submitted, not the timing of when the work was submitted. In other words: resist the urge to give a score that reflects the lateness of the submission more than the quality of work that was submitted.
  • Do not grade levels of participation or engagement separately. As instructors of future professionals, we need our students to grasp the way that their participation, engagement, and level of effort directly impacts their ability to perform competently and produce professional-level work. If we are right about that, we do not need to grade these inputs separately. If a class is well-designed, it will not be possible for someone to perform well on an assignment if they have not participated or been engaged meaningfully in the class prior to that! To grade engagement or participation separately risks double-counting; it is not necessary.

This last concern may at first sound more like an accuracy problem than a bias-resistance challenge; it risks double-counting poor participation and engagement. But there is also a serious bias problem when professors say they will grade “levels of participation” or “engagement” without clearly defining what “participation” and “engagement” mean. Similarly, a bias problem exists if professors do not adequately disclose how students can achieve that learning objective in a way that meets the professor’s expectations. The bias problem is especially challenging in large doctrinal classes, where students may only be able to speak, participate, or engage with the professor when the professor places them on call or initiates a Socratic dialogue with them about topics of the professor’s choosing.

If “participation” or “engagement” means talking in class, quiet or culturally-deferential students may be especially vulnerable to a professor’s implicit bias in favor of extroverted, alpha-type students who talk a lot, or out of turn. Especially in law school classrooms where professors retain nearly complete control over the decision of who gets to speak when and about what, it makes opportunities to demonstrate “participation” or “engagement” more difficult, particularly if those categories have not been carefully defined, if standards for achievement have not been published, and if students’ opportunities for demonstrating those inputs have not been intentionally monitored for parity.

It is not that engagement and participation do not matter. They do! They matter so much that if students shrug off their duty to participate and be engaged in a course, they will not be able to perform well on the merits. If you are concerned that a student might be able to perform well on an assignment in your course without engaging or meaningfully participating in the course work prior to the assignment….then you have a course design problem. The problem is yours.

  • Only summative assessments ought to be graded. Formative assessments—such as homework or practice problems—require feedback…but not Formative assessments are especially vulnerable to being distorted by a student’s learning environment outside of the classroom (which Feldman identified as problematic when it comes to bias-resistance).

And what about Feldman’s final value: the value that grading ought to be motivational for all students? When Feldman says we need a system of grading that is more motivational for all students, he means that the way we grade should “motivate students to achieve academic success, support a growth mindset, and give students opportunities for redemption”—even (especially!) when they do not earn one of the best-available grades.[12] 

Thus described, how might we make grading more motivational for all students?

  • Use rubrics and standards scales that are shared with students.
  • Give opportunities for retakes and re-dos (until the student performs the assigned task at a minimum level of competency).
  • Give tests without any points (but lots of feedback).
  • Grade minimally, and use a 0-4 scale when we do grade, so that students can easily see the relationship between their current level of performance and desired level of performance as a gap that can realistically be closed with additional effort. In other words: instead of lecturing or nagging students about having a growth mindset, use a grading scale that makes growth from one category of performance to another appear achievable.
  • Emphasize self-regulation. The more we can do to help students take responsibility for their own process of growth and learning, the better. This requires more than lecturing or telling them. By devoting precious educational time to self-reflection and meta-cognitive exercises, we can help students make critical connections, learn valuable lessons, and experience themselves as the driving agents who are ultimately responsible for their own education.
  • Create a community of feedback to support students in their individual journeys of learning, growth, and improvement.
  • Resist grading soft skills as separate grading inputs (unless the soft skill has been made a topic/subject of the course of instruction, such as when an entire course is devoted to “listening” or “leadership” or “communication” or “soft skills for lawyers”). In other words, if you are a Torts or Contracts professor, resist the urge to grade soft skills as part of that course.

I suspect this last suggestion might be surprising or controversial to some. To be sure, a well-meaning Torts or Contracts professor might wish to reinforce the importance of PIF’s soft-skilled competency in a doctrinal class. That might be a wise decision, but Feldman’s argument suggests that educators who care most about teaching students the soft skills they need to thrive in education and life are most effective when they give plenty of feedback but no separate grade for a soft-skilled performance.[13]

As Feldman describes it, “[w]hen we reestablish the causal relationship between soft skills and academic performance and no longer include soft skills in the grade, we increase students’ intrinsic motivation to develop those soft skills as a direct means to greater academic performance.”[14]

For Feldman, this approach is best because, in the twenty-first century, the most important and valuable soft skill of all is the skill of self-regulation.[15] Self-regulation requires “the active monitoring and regulation of a number of different learning processes: e.g., the setting of, and orientation towards, learning goals; the strategies used to achieve goals; the management of resources; the effort exerted; reactions to external feedback; the products produced.”[16] As Feldman explains it, “[w]e best teach self-regulation not by assigning points for soft skills, but instead by lifting the veil by defining soft skills, reducing biases through rubrics, delegating to students the responsibility to record soft skills and academic performance, and facilitating processes for reflection and goal-setting.”[17]

Feldman’s interest in teaching students how to be self-regulated learners brings us back to where I began this article: focused on our duty to teach lawyers how to be lifelong learners. Feldman’s emphasis on teaching self-regulation pairs perfectly with Hamilton’s articulation of PIF’s core learning objectives.[18] The arguments and ideas in Grading for Equity are much richer, deeper, clearer, and more stimulating than what this short blog post allows. Please read it! And then pass it along to a colleague.

For any willing to see it, please see it: when it comes to raising up the next generation of self-regulating lawyer-learners, we have a moral duty to use (and model) systems of assessment that are accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational. Let’s do it!

Christopher Corts is Professor of Law and Legal Practice at the University of Richmond School of Law.

[1] See Anton Hermann-Chroust, The Rise of the Legal Profession in America Vol. 1, (1st edition), University of Oklahoma: 1965).

[2] See Peter Drucker, “Post-Capitalist Society” at page 52 (Butterworth-Heinemann 1993) (“In the post-capitalist society it is safe to assume that anyone with any knowledge will have to acquire new knowledge every four or five years, or else become obsolete.”) Drucker later suggests that society needs “a new axiom: ‘The more schooling a person has, the more often he or she will need more schooling.’” He warns that American “doctors, lawyers, engineers, business executives are increasingly expected to go back to school every few years lest they become obsolete…” Id. at 186.

[3] My colleague, Laura Webb, makes this case effectively, using the lens of helping students how to think like teachers. Webb, Laura A., Why Legal Writers Should Think Like Teachers (August 17, 2017). 67 J. Legal Educ. 315 (2017). Available at https://jle.aals.org/home/vol67/iss1/13/.

[4] Neil Hamilton, “Introduction to the Definition of Professional Identity and the Formation of a Professional Identity,” Holloran Center Professional Identity Implementation Blog, available at https://tinyurl.com/mshz724s

[5] Feldman, J. (2019). About the Author. In Grading for equity: What it is, why it matters, and how it can transform schools and classrooms, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, a Sage Publishing Company.

[6] Id. at xiii (“About the Author”).

[7] Id. at p. 27 (“Equitable grading is Accurate, Bias-Resistant, and Motivational for all students.”).

[8] Id. at 228.

[9] For a helpful history of the curve in higher education, a survey of empirically-demonstrated ways the curve impairs and impedes learning, explanations of criteria-referenced forms of grading, and pragmatic suggestions for how to implement better assessments in the classroom, see Jeffrey Schinske, & Kimberly Tanner, Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently), 13:2 CBE–Life Science Education 159-166, available at https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.cbe-14-03-0054.

[10] Id. at 228.

[11] Id. at 228.

[12] Id. at 228.

[13] Id. at 205. In Chapter 13, Feldman outlines “Practices that build soft skills without including them in a grade.”

[14] Id. at 224.

[15] Id. at 216.

[16] Id. at 216.

[17] Id. at 224.

[18] Neil Hamilton, “Introduction to the Definition of Professional Identity and the Formation of a Professional Identity,” Holloran Center Professional Identity Implementation Blog, available at https://tinyurl.com/mshz724s.

October 3, 2023 by
Felicia Hamilton, Jerome Organ

“We’re Always Shaping People”: Podcast Interview with Jerry Organ, Co-Director of the Holloran Center

By: Felicia Hamilton, Holloran Center Coordinator

Jerry Organ, Bakken Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, University of St. Thomas School of Law

Our very own Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership, Jerry Organ, was recently featured on the Legal Docket segment of the podcast The World and Everything in It: September 11, 2023 Episode. Legal correspondent Jenny Rough speaks with Organ, along with hosts Mary Reichard and Nick Eicher, about the revision to Standard 303(b), which encourages law schools to provide opportunities for the development of a student’s professional identity.

In the interview, Organ emphasizes the importance of identity formation in a career that is focused on serving others:

Law school… [is] about developing a specialized knowledge base and a specialized set of skills that are directed toward serving others. So, part of professional school really is a shift from a kind of a self-focus to now acquiring knowledge, acquiring skills. I’m going to shift from being a student absorbing information to a lawyer who’s now serving others.” [1]

He also highlights the need for law students to have the opportunity to discover and test out their professional interests along with the importance of being able to process those experiences with a faculty mentor or advisor, noting that at the start of second and third years of law school there is a rich opportunity to help students process their summer experience and then plan for next steps on their journey.

Organ also speaks to the importance of having courses like St. Thomas’s Serving Clients Well intensive, which highlights communication and relationship skills and encourages students to focus on client service and to act in accordance with their values.

According to Organ, law schools are “always shaping people. We just have tended not to be very thoughtful about it. And what this new movement is really talking about is trying to help us as law professors and people involved in legal education be more intentional about what it is we want to be communicating to our students about what it means to be a lawyer.”

Listen to the full podcast episode and read the transcription here! The interview can be heard starting at 08:45.

[1] Rough, Jenny. “Legal Docket: Law and service.” The World and Everything in It, World News Group, September 11, 2023, https://wng.org/podcasts/legal-docket-law-and-service-1694291807.

Jerome Organ is the Bakken Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law

Felicia Hamilton is the Coordinator for the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

September 29, 2023 by
David Grenardo

Kill 1L: A Realistic Look at Legal Education Reform

By: David A. Grenardo, Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, University of St. Thomas School of Law

Prentiss Cox, a Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, previously published Law in Practice, a casebook to teach lawyering skills to first and second-year law students. His latest article, Kill 1L, proposes a bold, yet practical approach to reforming the 1L curriculum and experience to help develop law students into lawyers.

Here is the abstract of Professor Cox’s article:

Law school education has been extensively studied for decades, but changes have been modest. This Article makes the case that fundamental law school reform will not occur until we abolish the central pillar on which it rests—the current conception of the first year of law school, the “1L” experience. Many studies of law school curricula and pedagogy are sharply critical of the education offered, but they pull a punch when it comes to 1L. This Article compares recent data on 1L curricula at almost every U. S. law school with ABA-required law school statements of learning outcomes. The comparison reveals two contrasts: the gap between what is promised students for their legal education and what 1L delivers; and the gap between what is promised students and the actual use of law by attorneys, judges and even law professors in the modern world. The Article proposes a new 1L curriculum that would engage students in the law used by courts and policymakers while decreasing the demands placed on law students by the repetitive, inefficient legacy 1L curriculum.

A link to the article can be found here.

Should you have any questions or comments about the article, please feel free to contact Professor Cox at coxxx211@umn.edu.

 

September 19, 2023 by
Christopher Corts

Know Yourself, Learn Your Audience: Professional Identity Formation and Audience-Awareness in the 1L Legal Writing Classroom

By: Christopher Corts, Professor of Law, Legal Practice, University of Richmond School of Law

Teaching legal writing to 1Ls provides endless opportunities to help students grow their way through the stage-development process of professional identity formation. As students learn how to write in a way that effectively educates and persuades an audience of lawyers and judges, they learn important information about the particular skills, competencies, attitudes, and values they will need to develop if they are to successfully become the kinds of lawyers that employers want and society needs—the kind of lawyers they hope to be, in other words.

For today’s posting, I want to share a PIF-informed exercise I have developed in my Legal Analysis & Writing class. I will try to present it in a way that invites your own tinkering and innovation.

If you share my conviction that education toward professional identity formation (PIF) ought to be integrated into other subjects being taught in the law school curriculum, this exercise can help you experiment with one way that transparently PIF-focused education can help Fall Semester Legal Analysis & Writing students learn more about two of the primary audiences they will be writing documents for during both semesters of a 1L legal writing course: lawyers and judges.

In the opening weeks of a first-year legal analysis and writing course, legal writing professors have a unique opportunity to seamlessly integrate professional identity formation into their legal writing curriculum. As explained below, professional identity formation instruction can help legal writing professors achieve core goals in the legal writing curriculum. By introducing students to core legal writing concepts, language, and skills that students will need to succeed in the short-term (in the writing course), students will learn invaluable information about the kinds of skills, competencies, attitudes, and values that they will need to thrive as professionals in the long-term, in their hopefully-long careers as lawyers who analyze and write to help clients solve legal problems.

In the paragraphs that follow, I will attempt to briefly share what I have learned about how to integrate core analysis and writing objectives with professional identity formation-relevant content early in the 1L legal writing curriculum. To help facilitate your own experimentation, I will share the following:

(1) learning objectives to share with students;

(2) instructional resources that are useful for completing the unit of instruction;

and

(3) an instructional sequence you can use to execute the published objectives.

An appreciation for learning in context[i] is a core feature of any skills-based class. As professors of legal writing, we are lawyers who teach 1Ls early (and often) in their process of professional identity formation. We are uniquely positioned to introduce our students to two threshold questions from the very start of our writing courses. These two questions are familiar features of any professional communication course:

Who is your audience?  

What is your purpose for writing to them?

In the context of the opening weeks of a required 1L writing class, these two critical questions require students to do something nearly impossible for novices to do: imagine what it is like to actually be a lawyer, working in context, with limited (or possibly no) direct observation or experience.

Whatever 1Ls may come to law school knowing about the profession, even when they have practiced law in another country prior to enrolling in an American law school, this fact remains: no 1L has ever yet worked as a lawyer licensed by a jurisdiction in the American legal system.

As instructors, we know that, even as legal interns or summer associates, our students will be expected to complete core lawyering tasks in the same way that veterans of the profession complete them: in the context of a role-based, frequently-adversarial system that is populated by a range of familiar types. Whether our students’ future bosses prove to be some combination of happy, cranky, nurturing, or antagonistic, in the American legal system, all lawyers of every kind must figure out how to thrive in a stressful, unpredictable, ever-changing, perpetually time-deprived, chronically stressed-out, unapologetically-perfectionistic, hyper-achieving culture that defines us as a collective (and as individuals, if we are not intentional and careful). For better or worse.

Several years ago, wanting to give more intentional instruction about the context of lawyering earlier in my legal writing course, I started experimenting with offering a short unit of professional identity formation-style instruction during the first week of the course. I designed it to help legal analysis and writing novices do two foundational things: (1) learn about their audience (lawyers); and (2) learn how to write a simple C-R-A-C.

In the paragraphs that follow, having learned from trial and error, I will share three resources I have developed in order to help you experiment with your own version of this exercise in your legal writing class: (1) learning objectives; (2) instructional resources; and (3) an instructional sequence.

Part 1: Learning Objectives

This exercise uses conventional professional identity formation-related resources in order to achieve five learning objectives that are directly related to success in a legal analysis and writing course. Here is how I articulate the learning objectives for my students.

———————————————————————–

This short unit of instruction is designed to help familiarize you with one of every lawyer’s most frequent audiences: other lawyers. By completing this unit of instruction, you will more fully appreciate the people to whom you will be frequently writing in this course—lawyers and judges. The more you appreciate about them, the more you will understand how you need to learn, grow, and change over the next three years.

Specifically, completing this exercise will help you:

    • identify the features that help to demarcate law as a “profession”;
    • identify some of the issues related to quality, equity, well-being, and the delivery of legal services that all lawyers are professionally obligated to address as part of our duty to maintain the health and integrity of the profession and society’s system of legal justice;
    • identify some of the skills, values, and competencies that data suggests are most relevant to legal practice in America;[ii]
    • assess your own proficiency at the skills and competencies that data suggests are most relevant to legal practice in America; and
    • use your own self-assessment to practice writing a simple argument in the C-R-A-C form that is familiar to all lawyers, and which helps to distinguish legal arguments as belonging to a particular genre or type.

———————————————————————–

Notice: the final learning objective adds an additional layer of legal writing-specific instruction to the exercise. It helps to more seamlessly embed “professional identify formation”-style content and also justify it for especially literal-minded students who are expecting instruction relevant to Legal Analysis and Writing (or whatever your course may be titled).

In my experience, students embrace the purposeful design of the exercise. They have even enjoyed it; rare is the 1L who does not appreciate an opportunity to start a new educational initiative by thinking about herself! And it helps to teach students that professional identity formation can be easily integrated into a first-year legal analysis and writing course. All students can be assured that they will be learning about the skills most relevant to successful work as a professional by learning two of the skills most relevant to success in this course: (a) knowing your audience; and (b) expressing an argument that adheres to a simple IRAC / CRAC form in an audience-sensitive way.

Part 2. Instructional Resources

To achieve the learning objectives identified above, I draw from several resources:

A.  Excerpts from historical, first-person accounts of what it means to “be a lawyer”—especially those written by lawyers from historically-marginalized communities;[iii]

B.  Information about the history of the profession,[iv] professionalism, professional oaths, and other legal writing-specific educational content[v] published by state bar associations[vi];

C.  The “Profile of the Profession” data[vii] that is published annually by the American Bar Association; and

D.  Data about the skills, values, and competencies most relevant to legal practice.[viii]

In endnotes referenced above, I have identified particular texts and resources I have used through the years. But I have tried to describe the four general categories of instruction that I have tried to include. Collectively, these different categories help to capture what it means to be a professional and what it means to be a lawyer, specifically. And what skills, values, and competencies lawyers in America value in themselves and expect of other lawyers, given the particular needs of clients. There are a wealth of resources you can draw from. New resources are being updated and made available all the time. Experimentation is encouraged!

Part 3. The Instructional Sequence

Putting all of this together, the instructional sequence looks something like this:

  1. Preparation for class. Prior to class, I assign foundational homework to prepare students to complete the instructional sequence. The homework is usually some intentionally-curated combination of readings excerpted from suggestions I provided in end notes to Instructional Resources A. and B. in Part 2 above.Because I will be asking the students to write an IRAC / CRAC for the first time, I also assign a brief written introduction to IRAC / CRAC. I use an excerpt from the textbook I have adopted for my course[ix], but many other resources – including short videos published online – are easily accessible and can achieve the same purpose.
  2. In-Class Lecture and Work. During class, I deliver a lecture (with visual illustrations) that briefly introduces students to three topics:
    • (i) the most recent “Profile of the Profession” data published annually by the American Bar Association (as described in letter C. in the list of Instructional Resources provided in Part 2 above);
    • (ii) scholarship and data related to the professional skills, values, and competencies that are most relevant to legal practice (as described in letter D. in the list of Instructional Resources provided in Part 2 above);
    • (iii) the significance IRAC / CRAC in legal analysis and writing.
  3. Homework. After class, I have students complete two exercises, which they finish on their own time as homework following class.
    • First, they should complete a brief self-assessment exercise that asks students to rate and justify their proficiency in the skills and competencies covered in the readings and lecture (#1 & #2 above).
    • Second, when they have created that self-assessment exercise, they should complete an exercise that asks them to use the simple CRAC form to argue that they will make an effective lawyer based upon their ability to articulate a minimally-competent level of proficiency for three of the lawyer-competencies identified in the self-assessment exercise.For example, a simple C-R-A-C-style paragraph could mirror this form (with each student filling out the bracketed information based upon her assessment):

I believe I will make an effective Lawyer.[x] An effective lawyer is someone who can competently perform three or more skills that data suggests lawyers need for effective practice.[xi] Currently, I am at least minimally competent at doing [list 3 skills[xii] from the self-assessment tool that you can currently perform with at least a minimal level of proficiency].[xiii] For example, [here, in a series of short sentences, list each of the justifications you gave for the proficiency rating you assigned yourself for each of the three competencies you identified in the previous sentence.] In all these ways, since I have demonstrated I am at least minimally competent at doing [list again the three competencies selected above], I believe I will make an effective lawyer.[xiv]

    • Third, I collect the self-assessment instruments and the simple C-R-A-C. I do not mark, comment upon, or grade the self-assessment instrument. I do assess and provide detailed feedback – but not a grade – on the simple C-R-A-C paragraph. But when I assess it, I am only commenting on the correct form—whether they effectively wrote each component of the C-R-A-C acronym in that sequence.
    • Fourth, much later in the year, during the final class in Spring, I distribute the self-assessment exercise completed in Fall and ask students to read it, reflect on everything that has happened in the 1L year since the start of the Fall semester (when we completed the exercise), and update it. By asking students to complete the exercise again, they are able to make it current with any new experiences that they might have gained during the 1L year. By using this exercise to effectively book-end the 1L year in my course, I am able to help students appreciate the iterative process of self-reflection that will be key to lifelong learning in the profession. (Lifelong learning is a core lawyering skill!) This approach captures the stage-development process that I understand to be a hallmark of the professional identity formation process.

If you have any questions about how to plan or implement this exercise, or if you would like to share with me your own exercises or experiences doing comparable activities in the context of your course, please email me at ccorts@richmond.edu.

Christopher Corts is Professor of Law and Legal Practice at the University of Richmond School of Law.

[i] “There may be better and worse ways to learn to solve problems, but there appears to be no substitute for context. ” Gary L. Blasi, What Lawyers Know: Lawyering Expertise, Cognitive Science, and the Functions of Theory, 45 J. LEGAL EDUC. 313, 386-87(1995).

[ii] Whereas instruction designed for “professional identity formation” might emphasize education about professional culture as part of a process of indoctrination and enculturation, in the legal writing classroom, context is important for more discipline-specific reasons: because it can help students learn how to identify, research, analyze, and solve legal problems in order to write or verbally communicate coherent solutions for diverse audiences situated within that professional context. “There may be better and worse ways to learn to solve problems, but there appears to be no substitute for context.” Gary L. Blasi, What Lawyers Know: Lawyering Expertise, Cognitive Science, and the Functions of Theory, 45 J. LEGAL EDUC. 313, 386-87(1995).  

[iii] See, e.g., Virginia Drachman, “Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Equity Club, 1887 to 1890,” (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993). See also Constance Baker Motley, Equal Justice Under Law, (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux 1998).

[iv] To give one example: in the past I have used excerpts from Anton Chroust’s two-volume history of the profession, The Rise of the Legal Profession in America (1965). Of course, more contemporary histories are easily available (and probably more easily accessible to readers!) in a shorter form: articles, excerpts from professional responsibility textbooks, etc. My goal is to provide a short excerpt that helps the reader understand what it means to be “a profession” (as opposed to some other career) and what marks “legal professionals” as “professionals” in a sociological sense.

[v] See, e.g., The Supreme Court of Ohio Commission on Professionalism, “Professionalism Do’s and Don’t’s: Legal Writing,” accessible online at https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Publications/AttySvcs/legalWriting.pdf.

[vi] To give one compelling example, the state of Ohio publishes a number of professionalism resources that can introduce law students to the values and ideals of the profession—including some specific to legal writing. See, e.g., “Professional Ideals for Ohio Lawyers and Judges,” accessible online at https://www.uakron.edu/law/docs/proIdeals.pdf. See also The Supreme Court of Ohio Commission on Professionalism, “Professionalism Do’s and Don’t’s: Legal Writing,” accessible online at https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Publications/AttySvcs/legalWriting.pdf.

[vii] The ABA maintains an interactive website that houses all of the data. See http://www.abalegalprofile.com.

[viii] There are an ever-increasing number of resources you could use to help craft this exercise. In the past, I have found the IAALS “Foundations for Practice” webpage to be a sensible place to start. See https://iaals.du.edu/projects/foundations-practice. To read the original report, see Alli Gerkman and Logan Cornett, “Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient” (2016), accessible online at https://iaals.du.edu/publications/foundations-practice-whole-lawyer-and-character-quotient.  Allyson Carrel and Cat Moon have innovated an “agile competency model for the modern legal professional” called “Design Your Delta,” accessible online at https://www.designyourdelta.com/about. For a thoughtful, scholarly approach, see also Neil Hamilton, “Empirical Research on the Core Competencies Needed to Practice Law: What Do Clients, Lawyers, New Lawyers, and Legal Employers Tell Us?,” The Bar Examiner 6-16 (September 2014).

[ix] Jill Barton and Rachel Smith, “Handbook for the New Legal Writer,” Aspen Publishing, (2d ed., 2019).

[x] This first sentence is a CONCLUSION.

[xi] This second sentence is a RULE.

[xii] Do not worry about the arbitrariness of this rule selection for now. Later in the course, as we learn more about hierarchies of authority, we will learn how to synthesize binding and persuasive rules that are less arbitrary—and more compelling to our reader—than this crude rule. For now, we just need to pick three competencies so we can create a rule and practice articulating a simple, coherent argument in a recognizable C-R-A-C form our reader will expect.

[xiii] This third sentence provides ANALYSIS of the rule; it applies the three competencies above to your self-assessment. The next sentence provides justification for the way you are here applying the rule; it is part of your ANALYSIS, too, because it helps the reader understand your rationale for concluding that you will make an effective lawyer given the rule (that data suggests the three named competencies are relevant to effective lawyering).

[xiv] This is your final CONCLUSION.

April 13, 2023 by
Patrick Longan

Meeting Students Where They Are

By: Patrick E. Longan
W.A. Bootle Chair in Ethics and Professionalism
Mercer University School of Law

One of the first lessons I learned about teaching professional identity was Neil Hamilton’s oft-repeated observation that we must “meet the students where they are.” This may also be the most important lesson I have learned.

Let me give you an example. At Mercer, a big part of our professional identity course is a series of small group discussions of hypothetical dilemmas the students might face in practice. In one, they are in role as a junior partner in a large firm and discover evidence that a more senior partner, who is a rainmaker and the source of most of their work, may be overbilling their biggest client, a large corporation. The students are asked to come up with a plan for how they are going to proceed and to be ready to convince others in the small group discussions of the wisdom of the chosen course.

This is a classic problem of practical wisdom. There are many values in play, and they are in tension with each other. The junior partner wants to keep a good relationship with the senior partner, for personal and professional reasons. The senior partner has been a mentor, and, without a steady flow of work from the senior partner, the junior partner’s future in the firm is in doubt. At the same time, the junior partner has obligations to protect the firm and the client from the senior partner’s possible wrongdoing. Overlaying those conflicting goals is irreducible uncertainty. Before taking action, the junior partner cannot know for sure whether the senior partner is overbilling or how the firm will react to any questions the junior partner might raise.

The students receive some guidance about how to approach such problems. At a fundamental level, they know that one of the non-negotiable components of a lawyer’s professional identity is fidelity to the client. We teach it as a virtue and articulate it in first-person terms: “I am the kind of lawyer who fulfills my duties of utmost good faith and devotion to my client, and I do not permit my personal interests or the interests of others to interfere with those duties.” For this problem, the students also receive more detailed instructions. The problem offers them the options to do nothing, to raise the issue directly with the senior partner, to consult in-house ethics counsel, or to report the partner to the bar.

Because of all the uncertainty, there is no one right answer. Maybe the senior partner is a thief. Maybe he’s a sloppy timekeeper. Or maybe the partner has an arrangement with the client that allows him to bill a certain number of hours each month regardless of how many hours he actually expends. The students have to think through those possibilities and decide what to do.

This is where the lesson “meet the students where they are” comes in. Although there is no single right answer, at least one answer is wrong: the junior partner cannot choose to do nothing. Once a lawyer has substantial reason to believe that their client may have been the victim of overbilling by a partner in the firm, the lawyer must at least inquire further. Fidelity to the client demands action. In the possible overbilling scenario, there are better and worse ways of proceeding, but the lawyer must proceed in some way, even if it is against self-interest.

Every year we learn that many first-year law students cannot bring themselves to accept, even in a law school hypothetical, that they might be required to take personal risks to protect a client from the acts of another. When the students do a written reflection on the exercise, many write, with great candor and self-awareness, that they would not do anything that would put their position at risk, because they feel a primary obligation to protect themselves and their families from the loss of their jobs. Some describe this decision as “minding my own business,” or “staying in my lane,” or – my personal favorite – “not my circus, not my monkeys.” More than a few foresee catastrophic personal consequences if they lose their job. Others justify the decision by pointing out that the client in the hypothetical is a big corporation that would not miss the money.

Students do not respond in these ways because they suffer from character flaws. They are simply at an early stage of their professional identity development. It is our job to “meet them where they are.”

The most important part of doing that is not to be preachy or judgmental about the decision to do nothing in order to protect themselves. We should expect many students to have a self-interested disposition rather than a fiduciary one at this stage. Law students are all high achievers, and being disposed to look out for #1 has helped them succeed. Although we do not shrink from explaining that the decision to do nothing is unacceptable, we do so in a kind and understanding way. For example, we try to help the students see the situation through the client’s eyes. The client has to trust the lawyer and the law firm because the client is unlikely to be able to detect overbilling. The client would surely feel entitled to know if one of the firm’s lawyers was stealing from the client, if for no other reason than to begin the search for a new law firm. The reasons why acting as a fiduciary to a client are non-negotiable begin to emerge from those discussions.

Another aspect of “meeting them where they are” is to address their fears of losing their jobs if they report the senior partner. That is a possible outcome in the scenario. But some students panic because they foresee economic catastrophe.  Some say they fear “not being able to feed my family” or “losing everything I worked so hard for” if they lose their job. These fears are real because that is “where students are.” Many students lead precarious economic lives. Many have no assets or income and live on massive student loans that someday will need to be repaid. Their nervousness about money leads them, in responding to the problem, to cling to the good job they have with lockjaw tenacity, even if the client suffers. But the students do not appreciate that their economic lives as lawyers will be different from their economic lives as students. They do not realize that losing this particular job is unlikely to be quite so catastrophic. There are other firms, other jobs, other clients. There are steps they can take to insulate themselves from possible effects of switching jobs by cultivating their skill, reputation, and client base. At least in this part of the problem, we can speak some comfort to them. Although there is reason to be afraid of losing a job, there is likely no need to be terrified of it. We can start to move them from where they are to a place less filled with economic dread.

A final aspect of “meeting them where they are” in the handling of this problem is to address the suggestion that they owe less of a duty to a big corporate client than to a more sympathetic or impoverished one. The temptation to think that way at an early stage of professional identity development is understandable. Some of our students take a dim view of big business and instinctively feel entitled to condition their conduct as lawyers on the moral worthiness of the client.

If we handle this approach with understanding and patience, we can help the students cultivate a more mature professional identity. Early in the semester, we read a story about a criminal defendant who was executed after he received terrible representation, perhaps in part because his lawyers did not think he deserved it. After all, the client was a “wife-killer.” The students mostly were outraged by that. Many said “everyone deserves the lawyer’s best efforts” or something along those lines. When we play back those sentiments in our discussions about the representation of a large corporation, the students begin to move from where they are to a more sophisticated understanding of the lawyer’s role. If you can’t be 100% of a lawyer for a wife-killer, don’t represent him. If you can’t give your all for a big corporation, do something else. But the students begin to appreciate that selective fulfillment of the lawyer’s duties, depending upon the worthiness of the client, is not an option.

This is a specific example of a general point. Professional identity development is a process. Most law students are at an early stage. If we “meet them where they are” with understanding and kindness, we can help move them to where they need to be. Neil Hamilton taught me that. For this and so much else – thank you, Neil.

Please feel free to contact me at longan_p@law.mercer.edu if you any questions or comments about this post.

Patrick Longan
is the William Augustus Bootle Chair in Ethics and Professionalism in the Practice of Law at Mercer University School of Law and is Director of the Mercer Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism

March 31, 2023 by