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Barbara Glesner FInes

Barbara Glesner FInes, Daisy Floyd, David Grenardo, Erika Pont, Jerome Organ, Neil Hamilton, Patrick Longan, Timothy Floyd, Todd Peterson

By the Numbers: The Holloran Center

By Barbara Glesner Fines, Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law, Dean Emerita of UMKC School of Law

The occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Holloran Center provides an opportunity to review the Center’s twenty years by the numbers.

First, let’s just count heads at Holloran:

One. Neil Hamilton, whose interest and concern for professionalism and the development of ethical leaders has been the centerpiece of his work since the beginning of his career. A prodigious, thoughtful, humble, and generous scholar, his humility, wisdom, and collaborative spirit set the Center up for success from day one.

Two. Jerry Organ, with Neil, a founding member of the University of St Thomas School of Law. Also an influential scholar, Jerry has brought an indefatigable energy and a brilliant talent at convening and communication that ensured that the Holloran Center would never be a best kept secret.

Three. A magical number, that magic came together when Tom Holloran gave his time, talent, and treasure to ensure that the Holloran Center would have strength, stability, and impact. His spirit continues to animate it.

Four. By joining the Holloran leadership team, David Grenardo has broadened the focus and reach of professional identity formation. His scholarship’s focus on inclusivity and civility (not to mention his kindness and good humor) not only makes faculty want to be part of the Holloran Center mission, but also lets them know that they are welcome.

Five. Felicia Bennett, and Brady King before her, are the extraordinary assistants who have lent their own unique perspectives and skills to make sure that the Center gets the work done.

What happens when you add together a team like this? Addition becomes multiplication.

Let’s just consider publications.

Neil and Jerry have published eight books (and counting) that focus on some aspect of professional identity formation (PIF). Since then, at least fifteen other faculty members have published ten textbooks that also focus on this theme.

Neil, Jerry, and David have published over 120 law review articles, book chapters, or other academic monographs, not to mention over 100 blog posts, focusing on PIF. The multiplication is evident from a Lexis search identifying over four hundred law review articles that discuss professional identity formation; 139 of those have PIF in the title.

Then there are the Holloran Center’s workshops, conferences, and programs. By my count, over 300 faculty have attended a Holloran Center workshop. The leadership team also takes PIF on the road, with over 30 presentations annually at an alphabet soup of national and international organizations from pre-law advisors to the practicing bar and everywhere in between.

The consequence? Over 100 law schools have first-year required courses or programs on professional formation. With the passage of ABA accreditation standard 303(b) more will come, and they will look to the Holloran Center for leadership and guidance.

Three of the earliest of these law school programs prove how much impact on students this can mean:

The University of St. Thomas School of Law has a 1L course entitled “Serving Clients Well”. The program introduces students to the profession and its values and gets the students started on the law school’s Mentor Externship program. Serving Clients Well was started in 2018 with over 150 students having completed it each year. Many of these graduates have gone on to serve as mentors to the next generation of students in the program.

Another early example of a first-year PIF course can be found at Mercer Law in their 1L “Legal Profession” course, developed by Daisy Hurst Floyd, University Professor of Law and Ethical Formation; Patrick Longan, William Augustus Bootle Chair in Professionalism and Ethics; and Timothy Floyd, Tommy Malone Distinguished Chair in Trial Advocacy and Director of Experiential Education. The course was established in 2004 and is taught using Professors Floyd, Longan, & Floyd’s text, The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer, now in its second edition. Mercer’s 1L class size has stayed consistent at about 150 students a year over those twenty years since the course was founded. That means about 3,000 Mercer graduates began their law school journey immersed in virtue ethics and reflection on what it means to be a lawyer.

This year the Holloran Center recognized George Washington Law School for its signature PIF program. GW established its Fundamentals of Lawyering program in 2019. The required 1L course integrates PIF principles and is taught by a team of faculty members led by its Director, Professor Iselin Gambert, and by Associate Directors Professor Anita Singh and Associate Professor Erika Pont. The Fundamentals Program is part of a comprehensive program including the school’s Inns of Court and Foundations of Practice programs, directed by Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor Todd D. Peterson. These programs were conceived and planned in part through GW faculty attendance at multiple Holloran Center workshops. With GW’s average annual matriculation of about 600 first-year students, that adds up to 3,000 graduates impacted by the program to date.

Just these three courses, pioneered by leaders connected to the Holloran Center, have introduced over 7,500 students to the fundamental values of the profession and provided students opportunities for mentorship and reflection.

The Holloran Center’s broader impact shows that educational change does not happen because of one article or one speech. It happens when scholars name an important idea, develop it repeatedly, support it with evidence, build organizations and tools around it, bring other people into the work, and stay with it long enough for the idea to move from innovation to best practice. It happens when no one person owns an idea and early entrants are flexible enough to support and encourage the broadening of their ideas. It shows that real reform in legal education is not only intellectual. It is strategic, collaborative, and persistent.

The numbers make it clear that in twenty years of leadership, the Holloran Center has embodied the twin values of PIF: a continual striving for growth and excellence, and a deeply embedded value of service in ever widening circles.

Congratulations to the Holloran Center and to the hundreds of faculty, staff, students, attorneys, and judges who count themselves part of this extraordinary organization.

May 20, 2026 by hami3258

Barbara Glesner FInes, Jerome Organ

New Open-Source Textbook: INTERVIEWING & COUNSELING IN THE PROSPECTIVE CLIENT CONSULTATION

by Barbara Glesner Fines, Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law, Dean Emerita of UMKC School of Law

The Holloran Center is pleased to announce a new resource for a key skill for professional identity formation. Co-Director of the Holloran Center & Bakken Professor of Law Jerry Organ and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law, Dean Emerita of UMKC School of Law, and Holloran Center Fellow Barbara Glesner Fines have just published INTERVIEWING & COUNSELING IN THE PROSPECTIVE CLIENT CONSULTATION (eLangdell 2026).

Because the text holds a creative commons license, faculty can freely adopt and adapt the text for many different uses. Possible uses include:

A primary text in an interviewing and counseling course;
A secondary text in a lawyering skills course;
A resource to support client interviewing exercises in doctrinal or broader lawyering skills classes; and
Training materials to prepare students for clinics, externships, and competitions.

Because this is an open-source textbook, the materials are also free to students.

The text frames instruction in the context of the initial interview of a prospective client, although the counseling portion of the text goes beyond what many attorneys might actually address in an initial interview. The knowledge and skills addressed in the text can apply equally to any conversation with a client or others involved in a matter. The text provides ample opportunities for students to connect these skills to their ongoing conception of what it means to be an attorney, with practice problems representing diverse areas of practice and prompts for reflective writing or discussion.

You can access the book here: https://www.cali.org/books/interviewing-counseling-prospective-client-consultation.

Questions? Feel free to contact Jerry Organ (jmorgan@stthomas.edu) or Barbara Glesner Fines (glesnerb@umkc.edu).

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

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

May 18, 2026 by hami3258

Barbara Glesner FInes

Generative AI and Preparing Students for a Transformed Legal Profession

By: Barb Glesner Fines, Dean Emerita and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law,
UMKC School of Law

One of the reasons that artificial intelligence presents such a dramatic opportunity for the legal profession to increase efficiency and quality is the ability of generative AI to do some of the “dull and dirty”[1] work of law practice. We already use artificial intelligence to do document review, e-discovery, financial auditing, legal research, draft contracts, and more. Increasingly, it will be used to gain even more efficiencies in delivering legal services. We have seen the grossest of errors in using AI without supervision by experts, but problems of hallucinations and clear errors will decline as models improve. Yet, research also indicates that AI can produce these documents better than novices but not as well as experts.[2] Thus, we will still need experts to monitor the use of generative AI to ensure accuracy, fairness, creativity, and other values beyond simple win-loss metrics. We will still need experts to guard against abuses of AI.

The problem for legal education and for the formation of professional identity is that the profound expertise needed to be able to monitor generative AI requires professional judgment and deep mastery. Independent professional judgment and mastery are not acquired by classroom learning alone; they are acquired as an experiential matter through the process of trial and error, coaching, reflection, and feedback.

If novice tasks are undertaken by generative AI rather than novice attorneys, where will we develop the pipeline for the expert attorneys who will be able to supervise generative AI? This is a dilemma we face with each technology that frees humans from tasks. Calculators may not have had an overall negative impact on mathematics understanding and problem solving skills,[3] but it has undoubtedly decreased the skills of mental mathematics. Navigation skills have decreased with the introduction of GPS.[4] How will generative AI affect the development of new attorneys’ problem solving skills and independent judgment? How will legal education and the profession ensure that the next generation of attorneys have opportunities to develop these skills alongside the use of this powerful new technology?

This dilemma is yet another reason that intentional opportunities for professional identity formation are critical. The core pedagogies that develop professional identity are the pedagogies of apprenticeship. The challenge will be to design these experiences so that students learn not only how to harness the efficiencies of AI but also learn the skills to question and critique the products of AI while maintaining a commitment to the values of responsibility, service, and integrity. The answer must entail educators incorporating the use of generative AI into legal education and into the training of novices so that they can have the experiences of making mistakes and exercising judgment while also learning how to effectively use generative AI to assist them in those judgments. Kirsten Davis (Stetson University College of Law) and Carolyn Williams (University of North Dakota Law School) have been facilitating a “Legal Writing and Generative AI Convo Group” with over 450 law faculty to explore some of these issues. Undoubtedly each law school is having these same conversations amongst the faculty. Using the framework of professional identity formation to guide these conversations can help us think more deeply about how generative AI will affect the competencies our students need and the pedagogies that will best help them to acquire those competencies.

[1] Andrew McAfee & Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future 1498 (2017).

[2] Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI, Chapter 8 (2024).

[3] Aimee J. Ellington, A meta-analysis of the Effects of Calculators on Students’ Achievement and Attitude Levels in Precollege Mathematics Classes, 34:5 J. Math Education 433 (2003).

[4] Lukáš Hejtmánek, Spatial Knowledge Impairment after GPS Guided Navigation: Eye-Tracking Study in a Virtual Town, 116 Int’l J. Human-Computer Studies 15 (August 2018).

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

October 7, 2024 by hami3258

Barbara Glesner FInes

Drawing Pictures as a Professional Identity Formation Tool

By: Barb Glesner Fines, Dean Emerita and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law,
UMKC School of Law

As a new academic year begins, it’s that “fresh box of crayons” time of year. And so time for artwork to help us in understanding what it means to be a professional.

For over two decades, I have begun my Professional Responsibility (PR) class with a drawing exercise in which I ask students to “draw a picture of a professional.”[1] You could use this exercise in any course as we want our students to think about their professional identity formation throughout law school. Over the years, some things have remained constant with the pictures produced from this exercise – for example, briefcases still appear as the most frequent symbol of professionals.

Some things have changed. Women began appearing in about 2002 even though I had plenty of female students in my PR classes prior to 2002. Images of wealth and status waxed and waned. This year, after a six-year hiatus from teaching the PR course, I again repeated the experiment to see if new trends and assumptions were emerging. Here is my brief analysis of the new picture of professionals my students are bringing into the PR course.

It’s still hard work. Those briefcases are still there, this year with a litigation cart full of exhibits and a file cabinet stuffed full.
Technology is ubiquitous. Laptops, cell phones, smart watches… they haven’t quite replaced the briefcase, but they appear nonetheless.
Women are professionals. It’s hard to discern demographic data with stick figures (the artistic abilities of our students vary widely), but about 50% of the professionals appear to be women.
Not all professionals are attorneys. Professional athletes once again appeared as “bonus professionals”
Clients are in the picture! For nearly every year in which I conducted this exercise, the professionals in the picture were there alone. Occasionally a judge would appear. One-third of this semester’s students had a client in the picture (which is the punchline of the exercise – “a professional keeps the client in the picture”). The increased experiential opportunities (and requirements) of today’s students may explain why their picture of a professional reflects this vision of a service professional.

If you would like to see your students’ images of professionals, here are some suggestions.

Think about timing. I like to use this as an assignment on the first or second day. It’s a good ice-breaker, the students don’t have any preset notions of what they are “supposed” to draw, and you can use the pictures to develop themes you will emphasize during the course. For example, I always end the exercise by emphasizing to students that, as service professionals, we need to keep the client “in the picture” and remember that there are others in the picture as well for whom we have responsibilities.
Think about the image you are looking for. I start with “professional” because I use the exercise in professional responsibility, but you could ask for images of clients, lawyers, judges, or advocates… or even abstract concepts like justice or fairness.
Emphasize to the students that artistic talent doesn’t matter and that symbols are welcome. Discourage the use of words. Let students know that you will be showing some or all of the pictures to the class. Emphasize that the assignment is anonymous and they need not claim their artwork.
Collect the pictures and quickly sort through them for thematic elements. Use the document camera and just show one picture after another, noting the themes that jump out at you. Students will laugh and relax, which enhances learning. Difficult subjects can be raised without a lot of elaboration. I’ve had pictures raisestudent concerns about inclusion, wellness, workload, debt, and other deeply personal and difficult subjects. When students see they are not alone in these concerns, it opens doors for conversations.
I have never followed up the exercise with a written reflection, but one certainly could do so effectively.
Needless to say, while this exercise gives me a great deal of formative assessment of student attitudes and assumptions, it is not for a grade.

For ourselves, too, drawing exercises can be an excellent tool for capturing snapshots of perspectives and as a catalyst for reflection and conversation about professional identity. Recently, I had the opportunity to ask a group of legal educators to complete this same exercise but with the prompt to “draw a picture of a law professor.” [2]

How do you picture your professional identity?

^[1] To read more about this exercise and see pictures from students from 2007-2017, see Barbara Glesner Fines, Picturing Professionals: The Emergence of a Lawyer’s Identity, 14 U. St. Thomas L.J. 437 (2018) available at: https://irlaw.umkc.edu/faculty_works/94.

[2] My article exploring the identity of law professors based on this exercise is forthcoming in Volume 2 of the Journal of Law Teaching and Learning (forthcoming 2024) at https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawteachingjournal/.

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

August 23, 2024 by hami3258

Barbara Glesner FInes, David Grenardo, Felicia Hamilton, Jerome Organ, Kendall Kerew, Louis Bilionis, Neil Hamilton

Welcoming the new year with gratitude: Holloran Center Resolutions for 2024

By: Barbara Glesner Fines, Dean and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law, UMKC School of Law

What better time to reflect on professional identity formation than the new year, when so many of us are making resolutions for growth and improvement. Here are three of our resolutions for the Holloran Center’s continued formation:

We resolve to be grateful. We are grateful for the leadership of Tom Holloran, whose example of servant leadership inspires us. We are grateful for the work of scholars and teachers in other professions who have given us so many insights and inspiration. We are especially grateful to you, our colleagues engaged in this work of coaching, mentoring, and guiding our students in their transformation from student to lawyer.
We resolve to listen. This past year, we have learned so much from the questions and critiques posed by our colleagues. What do we really mean by formation? How is it different from the knowledge and skills transfer we aim to teach and provide? How do we assess development? How do or should concepts of professionalism and civility fit into professional identity? What about this idea of “identity”? How does that singular-sounding noun reconcile with our diverse cultures and values as individuals and communities? How do we ensure that the work of formation is shared and equitably by our entire community? Our understanding of our work has evolved with each question and challenge.
We resolve to share. Since 2013, over 400 scholars, teachers, and student services professionals from over 60 law schools have attended a Professional Identity Formation workshop or conference or symposium sponsored by the Holloran Center. We look forward to hosting at least three additional workshops in 2024: a conference for professional responsibility scholars and teachers in April, along with two summer workshops. We will continue to support others leading in this effort. We are also working to develop our online community: revising our databases of materials and inventories, and growing our blog and listserv. Let us know how we can help.

Happy New Year!

Neil, Jerry, David, Lou, Barb, Kendall, and Felicia

January 5, 2024 by hami3258

Barbara Glesner FInes

Final Exams and Professional Identity Formation

By: Barbara Glesner Fines, Dean and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law, UMKC School of Law

As final exam season nears, we who teach doctrinal classes are turning our efforts toward constructing final exams that will fairly assess our students’ mastery of the learning outcomes we have set for our class. What conclusions might we draw about the final exam experience as an opportunity for students to experience being a lawyer or to reflect on what that identity means?

We might conclude that some traditional final exam approaches are not well suited as intentional formation experiences. Multiple-choice, standardized questions are unlikely to provide an opportunity to develop one’s conception of the role of attorney. While these exam question approaches can be helpful for assessing knowledge and, to some degree, analytical skill, they are an experience that is entirely academic. Traditional essay questions, even when framed as “you are the attorney for…” or asking students to “advise your client,” are equally unlikely to help students to form a professional identity. When delivered in the artificial environment of a timed, in-class final exam, students are unlikely to see these essay exams as experiences in which they are acting in an authentic lawyering role.

Nevertheless, traditional exam approaches are not irrelevant to professional formation. All communicate the need for professionals to prepare diligently, perform well under pressure, and communicate clearly: all part of the professional value of striving for excellence. However, they also may communicate negative habits and mindsets.

If the final exam is the only opportunity for graded credit that students receive during a semester, students are taught that day-to-day work has little value compared to the ability to deliver on deadline. Many of our students have intellectual abilities that allowed them to earn high grades during their undergraduate education by simply “cramming” for final exams rather than requiring steady, daily practice. Unfortunately, many attempt and even succeed in that same approach to their work in law school. It is little wonder, then, that we see the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct needing to comment that, “Perhaps no professional shortcoming is more widely resented than procrastination.”[1] One way, then, to create opportunities for students to internalize a strong commitment to sustained, quality work is to make sure that the final exam is not the only place in which they are given feedback or earn reward.

Probably the most powerful formation aspect of final exams is what comes after they are over: grades. Grades can impact professional formation in many negative ways. Law students, already overly reliant on external measures of self-worth, can be pushed even further in that direction. Students can take grades as indicia of career opportunities and academic expectations. For those at the bottom of the curve, grades can create a sense of hopelessness that undermines continual improvement. Students at the top of the statistical grade curve are not unaffected either. Their top-percentage grades can lead them to feel that they are doing something wrong if they do not enter the large firm tournament.

There is a tension here of course. The more we use “grades” to motivate student performance, the more we emphasize an external locus of control. We can find ways to provide frequent feedback and give students credit for regular practice without sending a message that student’s performance is tied to their competitive grade ranking with their peers. For example, regular practice quizzes or exams (i.e., evaluated but ungraded) can give students a way to assess their progress and earn the intrinsic satisfaction of producing a quality product.

As one of the most powerful experiences in law school, final exams could become transformative opportunities for students to reflect on their own attitudes toward professional work and value. For law schools to help make that happen, we must build in more opportunities to communicate with students about the meaning of exams and grades. We could engage students to reflect on the exam experience after it is over, develop the habit of reflection on performance for continual improvement, and right-size the impact of grades on their own self-evaluation. We do not generally structure our academic calendars to incorporate such an experience. That doesn’t mean that such an experience could not be built into our academic programs as part of an overall professional identity formation program.

Do any schools have such a program? Please share your experiences on the Holloran Center PIF listserv or with me at bglesnerfines@umkc.edu.

[1] ABA Model Rule 1.3, Comment 3.

November 30, 2023 by hami3258

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.

October 26, 2023 by hami3258

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 hami3258

Barbara Glesner FInes

Bryan Stevenson’s Transformative Moment of Professional Identity

By: Barbara Glesner Fines, Dean and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law, UMKC School of Law

Award-winning attorney and scholar Bryan Stevenson begins his book Just Mercy^[1] with a story of his experience in law school and the transformative moment when he understood what it meant to be a lawyer and the kind of lawyer he wanted to be.

Stevenson recounts his first-year experience at Harvard where “the courses seemed esoteric and disconnected from the race and poverty issues that had motivated me to consider the law in the first place”^[2] and he was “left feeling adrift.”^[3] This is precisely the challenge raised by William Sullivan in the Carnegie study of the professions in which he notes legal education’s neglect of “the third apprenticeship.”^[4]

The transformative formation experience for Stevenson occurred in the summer after his first year of law school when he participated in a month-long field experience with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. The experience combined three of the core pedagogies of professional identity formation: mentoring, acting as an attorney, and reflection.

First, Stevenson met the director of the SPDC on the flight to Atlanta and immediately found a mentor and role model. As Stevenson recounts that initial meeting, “He showed none of the disconnect between what he did and what he believed that I’d seen in so many of my law professors.”[5] The disconnect between the academy and law practice Stevenson felt is one that still bedevils law schools today and is an important lesson in the necessity for collaboration in developing professional identity formation opportunities in law schools. Guest speakers in the classroom and practice panels or networking opportunities outside the classroom are not just a way to enliven our curriculum or help our students find jobs. These are opportunities for students to consider models of lawyering and connect with mentors.

In this field experience course, Stevenson had the opportunity to engage with a client in his role as a student attorney. He entered that experience unprepared for its impact. “I wasn’t prepared to meet a condemned man. In 1983, I was a twenty-three-year-old student at Harvard Law School working in Georgia on an internship, eager and inexperienced and worried that I was in over my head…. When I signed up for this internship, I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that I would actually be meeting condemned prisoners. To be honest, I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a lawyer.”[6]

Stevenson was given a simple task in this encounter – tell the client that he would not have an execution date in the coming year. Placing students in roles as attorneys, no matter how well prepared they are, generates intense emotion for most students – excitement, fear, anxiety, insecurity – and this emotion heightens the impact of the experience. This was true for Stevenson, who entered the prison convinced that he had nothing to offer his client.

Like many transformative formation experiences, the visit was full of surprises for Stevenson: the client’s unexpected gratitude, the personal connection he found with the client, the experience of the brutality of the prison guard’s treatment of his client and his guilt that his visit had contributed to that treatment, and the client’s strong, faith-filled reaction to sing the hymn “Higher Ground” as he was taken away from the visitor room. Stevenson left “completely stunned”[7] and transformed. He became an attorney and the experience in turn changed his entire motivation and approach toward law school:

I finished my internship committed to helping the death row prisoners I had met that month. Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person’s humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own. I went back to law school with an intense desire to understand the laws and doctrines that sanctioned the death penalty and extreme punishments. I piled up courses on constitutional law, litigation, appellate procedure, federal courts, and collateral remedies. I did extra work to broaden my understanding of how constitutional theory shapes criminal procedure. I plunged deeply into the law and the sociology of race, poverty, and power. Law school had seemed abstract and disconnected before, but after meeting the desperate and imprisoned, it all became relevant and critically important.[8]

In Bryan Stevenson’s recounting of this first experience with a client on death row, we can see the power and impact of providing opportunities for students to engage with role models and act in the role of attorney. We see how, especially combined with a reflective lens to focus on the meaning of these experiences, these formation experiences help to focus and shape a student’s learning and provide the foundation for their career.

[1] BRYAN STEVENSON, JUST MERCY: A STORY OF JUSTICE AND REDEMPTION (2014).

[2] Id. at 4.

[3] Id. at 5.

[4] William M. Sullivan et al., Carnegie Found. for the Advancement of Teaching, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007).

[5] Stevenson, supra note 1, at 5.

[6] Id. at 3.

[7] Id. at 12.

[8] Id. at 12-13.

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

June 8, 2023 by gren2380

Barbara Glesner FInes

The Curse of Coverage and Professional Identity Formation

By: Barbara Glesner Fines, Dean and Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law, UMKC School of Law

In any conversation about integrating greater opportunity for professional identity formation pedagogy into the curriculum, particularly when suggesting that this be part of the required doctrinal curriculum, one will hear an objection that there is no room.[i] For many doctrinal teachers, incorporating professional identity formation opportunities or focus into classes would require sacrificing critical doctrinal content and analytical skills. The pressures toward coverage as a course goal are not insubstantial. Textbooks grow exponentially each year, reflecting the growing breadth of the law and legal resources. If a faculty member assigns only a small portion of a textbook, or their syllabus identifies far fewer topics than those contained in the syllabi of other professors teaching the same course, then students feel cheated. The “mile-wide, inch-thick” bar exam looms over all.

The pressures toward broad coverage of doctrine as the primary goal of course design are premised on a number of false premises about student learning. First, faculty presume that coverage means learning, when research tells us that more content does not mean more learning. “If learning is to endure in a flexible, adaptable way for future use, coverage cannot work. It leaves us with only easily confused or easily forgotten facts, definitions, and formulas to plug into rigid questions that look just like the ones covered.”[ii] Research in undergraduate programs and medical schools confirms that more content does not lead to more learning. Deep learning requires context, repetition, application, and reflection. For this reason, experts in course design emphasize focusing on “the big questions” or the “hard parts” of a course, so that students can master not only a doctrinal subject but also an approach to learning that subject that will support their lifelong learning.

Second, faculty presume that professional identity formation opportunities are disconnected from knowledge and skills, rather than providing the critical context that motivates and supports deep learning. Quite the opposite is true. Students approach their subject-matter study with much greater engagement and a broader lens when they are asked to do the following: (1) consider themselves in the role of attorney in applying a particular doctrine; (2) examine how the law impacted the individual clients in the cases they are studying; or (3) reflect on how the values brought forth in the classroom discussions comport with their own personal values and experience.

Third, faculty presume that the classroom is the primary locus of learning, when even the American Bar Association’s definition of a credit hour recognizes that most of a student’s learning occurs outside of class. Classroom time is only one-third of the time students devote to any given subject. Many faculty are coming to realize that this precious time in which students are together in the classroom is squandered if the opportunities for discussion, debate, and practice are spent on lectures (even if interspersed with question prompts) designed to cover content. Even before the pandemic disrupted pedagogies, faculty had discovered the possibilities of a flipped classroom – providing lectures and efficient delivery of knowledge transfer outside of class and using class time to focus on development of skills and perspectives. Faculty can then more easily take a small but significant further step to ensure that a frame for these exercises is the student’s own development as a professional.

So how do we exorcise the curse of coverage and make room for opportunities for professional identity formation in the classroom? We do so by questioning the assumptions that more content is critical to learning and instead focusing on the big questions, marrying professional formation with knowledge and skill development, and finding more efficient ways to deliver content instruction outside of class so as to engage students more fully in the classroom. Please reach out to me at bglesnerfines@umkc.edu if you have any questions or comments.

[i] This piece is excerpted from The Curse of Coverage and Professional Identity Formation, U. St. Thomas L. Rev. (Forthcoming 2023).

[ii] Grant P. Wiggins & Jay McTighe, Understanding By Design 46 (2nd ed. 2005)(Lee Shulman, Taking Learning Seriously, 31(4) Change 10, 12 (July/August 1999).)

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

May 24, 2023 by gren2380

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