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Lawyering Skills

Eric Goldman, Laura Norris

Successful Outcomes from Santa Clara Law’s Tech Edge JD Experiment

By: Laura Norris, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Associate Clinical Professor, Director of the Tech Edge J.D., Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute,
Santa Clara University School of Law

Eric Goldman, Associate Dean of Research, Professor of Law, Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara University School of Law

In 2018, Santa Clara Law launched an important new program called the Tech Edge JD (TEJD). It is a certificate for JD students with several design features centered around skill-building and professional identity formation. TEJD requires students to complete a series of milestones to give them the experiences employers expect Silicon Valley professionals to have. TEJD students get support from a faculty/staff advisor, two practitioner mentors, and the entire TEJD community.

TEJD has achieved some remarkable outcomes in its first four years. This blog post highlights three: improved admissions yield while increasing incoming LSAT score, increased racial diversity, and improved employment outcomes.

Incoming students apply to TEJD at the same time they apply to law school. Admission is discretionary based on supplemental essays and a video interview. LSAT/GPA isn’t part of the TEJD admissions criteria, but TEJD cohorts nevertheless have higher LSATs than their overall Santa Clara Law classes.

Despite the higher LSAT scores of incoming TEJD students, their yield has been 11-29% higher than the school’s overall admissions yield. This indicates that TEJD helps the law school compete for students with more choices.

Santa Clara Law is already a racially diverse law school, but TEJD has outperformed the law school’s racial diversity rates. This enhanced diversity may reflect the downplaying of LSAT/GPA in TEJD admissions decisions.

Though TEJD requires students to spend substantial time on activities outside the classroom to complete their milestones, this has not come at the expense of academic achievement. TEJD students have higher law school GPAs than the overall class, even on an LSAC-adjusted basis.

TEJD students have also had improved employment outcomes. The first cohort (graduating class of 2021) had 100% employment their 1L summer (most paid, some externships). That cohort had 80% employment on graduation (+40% compared to overall Santa Clara Law grads) and 100% employment 10 months later (+18%).

We think TEJD represents an important innovation in legal education with many potential lessons for the legal education industry. Our paper, “How Santa Clara Law’s “Tech Edge JD” Program Improves the School’s Admissions Yield, Diversity, & Employment Outcomes,” spills all of the details, including how the TEJD program is designed and what we think worked and what didn’t. The article also does the following: identifies what we think are the keys to TEJD’s success; discusses students’ self-identification during the application process, the pre-orientation TEJD orientation, and students’ professional identity formation early in their law school careers; and describes the extensive advisor/mentor support. The features of TEJD can be easily adopted by other schools, with or without replicating TEJD.

Should you have any questions about the TEJD program or if you would like to discuss how your school can adopt the program (or aspects of it), then please contact Dean Goldman at egoldman@gmail.com or Dean Norris at lnorris@scu.edu.

Laura Norris is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Associate Clinical Professor, Director of the Tech Edge J.D., and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Eric Goldman is the Associate Dean of Research, Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law

October 18, 2022 by
Sarah Beznoska

Professional Identity Formation and First-Generation Law Students

By: Sarah Dylag Beznoska, Assistant Dean for Student and Career Services,
Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University

It comes as no surprise to those of us who work with law students on first destinations and career paths that when the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) studied national employment statistics for the graduating class of 2020, it found that whether or not you are a first-generation law student impacts your career outcomes in the law.

NALP reported: “Overall, Class of 2020 continuing-generation JD students (graduates who have at least one parent or guardian with a JD degree) and continuing-generation college students (graduates who have at least one parent or guardian with a bachelor’s degree or higher, but whose parents/guardians all lack a JD degree) had a higher employment rate and were more likely to be employed in a bar passage required/anticipated job than their first-generation college student peers.”

The Law Student Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) also consistently highlights important disparities related to first-generation law students. From LSSSE, we know that first-generation law students bear more law school debt and face significant stressors related to debt. We know that “the amount of time that first-generation law students [spend] with peers and faculty outside of class [is] significantly less than non-first-generation law students.” LSSSE data has shown that first-generation students also participate in co-curricular opportunities at a lower rate that non-first-generation students, spend more time studying, and spend more time working to support themselves.

This data should be important to everyone in the legal industry, especially as we talk about diversifying our workplaces and our leadership. It is particularly important to me as someone who works in career services at an urban law school that serves a significant population of first-generation college and law students. To provide the best student and career services to our students, we are continually assessing our work through the viewpoint of first-generation students and making adjustments to provide better support.

This assessment can be done for professional identity formation (PIF) too. Understanding and accounting for the unique experiences noted above is critical to developing any comprehensive PIF plan. On the positive side of things, schools can leverage PIF to build belonging for first-generation students. At the same time, being mindful about the time constraints sometimes faced by first-generation students might inform the methods a school chooses for offering PIF opportunities.

First-Generation Students and Law School Culture: Professional Identity to Build Belonging

Belonging matters to law student success, and most especially to first-generation law students. The unique culture of law school and the legal industry can be a challenging adjustment even when someone has lawyers in their family. Without knowing any lawyers or having people already in their network to ask for help, first-generation law students can feel like outsiders from day one. (For some insights on the first-gen experience see: https://abaforlawstudents.com/2021/08/25/first-generation-law-student-challenges/ and https://abaforlawstudents.com/2020/01/01/how-to-thrive-as-a-first-generation-law-student/).

For this reason, I have sometimes been skeptical of the premise of professional identity formation that focuses on students moving from an “outsider” in the profession to an “insider” in the profession. As someone who was a first-generation law student myself (although I was not the first in my family to attend college), I know very personally that not having lawyers in my family or lawyers in my network impacted my law school experience in a negative way. From day one of law school, I internalized deeply that I did not belong and, although my law school trained me well on the doctrinal skills, I never once came to a place there where I felt like an “insider.”

It is because of this personal experience, however, and because of the commitment I have to making sure that first-generation students at the law school where I work never feel this same way, that – as much as I can be skeptical about the terminology of PIF – I think PIF can be leveraged to build more belonging. There are a variety of ways a school might use PIF to increase belonging. For example:

  • Self-Assessment and Industry-Focused Panels: having students complete self-assessment exercises allows them to identify strengths and values that they bring with them to the profession. Taking it a step further, once schools provide an opportunity for students to identify their strengths and values, schools can offer diverse panels of attorneys to demonstrate the varying skillsets that can make someone successful. Providing students with opportunities to know their own strengths and then to see those things in successful practitioners can help them to feel like there is a place in the law for them and who they are matters.
  • Mentoring: providing thoughtful mentoring opportunities allows students to feel less alone in their journey through law school. Schools can engage alumni, peers, faculty, and staff in formal and informal mentoring programs with students, giving them a broad set of people to whom they can turn for support. Consider, also, having faculty, staff, or alumni identify themselves to students as first-generation students, so that your first-generation cohort has examples of first-generation success stories.
  • Student Organizations: schools can support student leaders to create a robust community of student engagement and a space where students can connect with each other and feel less alone. Connecting student organizations to a school’s alumni network can be helpful and assisting student organizations with career-related programs can give students more opportunities to understand the variety of paths in the law.

These three things have worked for us as a starting point to increase belonging at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. We start at day one when we dedicate a portion of our Orientation to professional identity. This Orientation program covers the essential eligibility requirements for the practice of law in Ohio and the 26 Lawyering Effectiveness Factors. More importantly, it includes diverse panel speakers who reflect on what these things mean in their practice, along with when and where they developed these skills.

We also require incoming law students to complete the Law Fit assessment, and we use those assessments with them in their meetings with career advisors. In addition, together with my team in Student and Career Services, we have built a one-on-one alumni mentor program and a one-on-one peer mentor program for every first-year student who enrolls with us. Later this Fall, we will offer a Storytelling event to our student body, in partnership with our First-Generation Law Student Association, focusing on things like times when we and they have felt imposter syndrome and why one’s personal story matters.

First-Generation Students and Time: Creating Meaningful Space for Students to Reflect

One of the foundational concepts behind PIF is reflective thinking and opportunities for reflective exercises to help students understand their values, the values of the profession, and the competencies required to be a successful lawyer. Reflection, in turn, requires time and space that are carved out to allow specifically for it. Time is a valuable resource for all students, but especially for first-generation law students. Therefore, PIF plans must be mindful of these time constraints.

There are a lot of reasons why first-generation students might not have time for PIF. For example, if they are working significant hours outside of the law school in legal or especially in non-legal jobs to support themselves, if they face family or personal expectations or obligations (especially from family members or personal connections who are unfamiliar with the legal industry), if they are trying to plan the logistics of taking two months off (unpaid and without benefits) after graduation to study for the bar exam, or if they are de-railed by a financial, health, or other crisis without social capital or resources to support them. In the optional space of Student and Career Services, when we support students with challenges like these, there is sometimes precious little time or energy available to ask students to reflect on how a chosen work or academic experience contributes to their professional identity.

Worse, when I see my first-generation students struggling with time, I worry that PIF will feel to them like optional engagement that is only possible for those law students who are supported by deep family resources or who are not struggling with other life priorities. I also worry whether they will trust me if I ask them to add to their already overflowing plates the additional work required by PIF. Notably, I believe these students are frequently already very self-directed learners, but they are people with clear and important demands on their time that often do not leave room for any optional piece of the law school curriculum.

For this reason – to bring all students along in PIF – schools must be creative about how and when to include PIF in the law school experience, and be respectful of the time constraints students might face, depending on their circumstances.

  • Bring PIF to Students: one option, of course, is to build into the existing curriculum opportunities for reflection and discussions about professional identity. But, if that won’t work for your school/classroom, schools might consider inviting the career services team to stop by before or after classes to provide handouts or resources that are aligned with related career paths. Schools can emphasize the importance of related programming that is happening outside of the classroom and encourage students to make strategic decisions about which to attend. Schools can include in other required spaces – Orientation, graduation-required courses, student leader trainings – information about building lawyering skills. Schools can encourage students to work with academic advisors, staff, or alumni to create a plan that works for them, and schools can help those advisors, staff, and alumni to have the PIF information they need to be impactful.
  • Create a PIF-focused Course: changing the curriculum to include a new course is another option, and one that may or may not be a fit for a school. For better or worse, however, we know that in a world impacted by COVID, general student engagement in optional parts of the law school experience is significantly decreased. Add to that the time constraints we know our first-generation students face and we simply cannot wait for students to come to us. As I’ve learned from my colleagues in the undergraduate space, we are responsible for finding ways to go to them. One way to go to them is to create a credit-bearing course that will reward students for doing PIF work while creating a meaningful space for first-generation and other time-strapped students to include the work among their other priorities.

At Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Students and Career Services has seen some movement with bringing PIF to students. For example, my department no longer expects that attendance will be robust at optional career related programs. Instead, we collaborate with student organizations on panel presentations and visit their student organization meetings to connect. We bring handouts and resources to student-run events, instead of requiring them to come to us for the information. We try to model the behavior we are seeking from students by showing up to the programs and panels that they have organized rather than simply demanding they show up at ours. We also leverage our alumni and peer mentor programs to provide resources to students. It is clear to us that peer-to-peer advising among students is at an all-time high, and rather than discourage or limit this connection, we provide information and resources to support it.

Perhaps most importantly, we try to ask students for input on what kinds of activities will help them most when it comes to lawyering skills. Without exception, they prefer activities that require engagement from them, opportunities to become involved in the community through pro bono work, and learning experiences where they connect with others. As a result, we are adjusting our traditional Student and Career Services programming to offer more of these kinds of experiences, and fewer lectures/presentations, while also incorporating reflective coaching questions into our everyday conversations with students.

Conclusion

Supporting first-generation law students to succeed is a critical component of increasing diversity in the legal industry. When PIF is offered thoughtfully and in a way that is mindful of time as a resource, it can be a place where schools can provide that support, not just through efforts focused on belonging, but also efforts focused on financial wellness, building support networks, introductions to professional norms, and academic planning.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, then please feel free to contact me at s.beznoska@csuohio.edu.

Sarah Dylag Beznoska is the Assistant Dean for Student and Career Services at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University.

October 13, 2022 by
Jabeen Adawi

Clinical Pedagogy: Paving the Way for Professional Identity Formation

By: Jabeen Adawi, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law, Director of the Family Law Clinic, University of Pittsburgh School of Law

In response to the American Bar Association (ABA) revised accreditation standard 303(b) requiring schools to provide “substantial opportunities to the students for… (3) the development of a professional identity,” law schools around the country began to remedy a perceived gap in legal education: the formal and intentional development of a cohesive professional identity. Unlike other client-serving professions—such as medicine or social work—law schools are often critiqued as not doing enough to explicitly support the development of a cohesive professional identity for lawyers. Legal education seemed to rely heavily on the existence of the model rules of conduct and one class in legal ethics to ensure that new lawyers understood their fiduciary responsibilities as lawyers. However, all along clinical pedagogy has been equipping clinical programs to move students through identity formation. Below, I’ll explain how at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, the clinical faculty drew from well-developed tools and teaching approaches to synthesize a clinic-wide foundational orientation for clinic students that directly responds to standard 303(b).

The ABA standard states that professional identity is developed through an “intentional exploration of values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.” In analyzing the new standard, three distinct elements have emerged:

  • Internalizing a deep responsibility and care orientation to others, especially the client,
  • Developing ownership of continuous professional development towards excellence at the major competencies that clients, employers, and the legal system need, and
  • Well-being practices.

The goal of our foundational orientation is to equip students with common skills and perspectives they will refine during their clinical experiences. Since this is our first pre-semester orientation, we are beginning with a half-day program of three sessions followed by a lunch and a small swearing-in ceremony. The skills we focus on meet the three elements of professional identity formation but are not exclusively the only ways we support student growth in our program.

Internalizing Deep Responsibility to Others

The first element promotes the fiduciary responsibilities of lawyers to their clients and society at large. It centers on developing and nurturing a mindset prioritizing a client’s interests above a lawyer’s self-interest. It also orients a law student to the profession’s commitment to pro bono services and developing a justice system that provides equal access and eliminates bias, discrimination, and racism.

To address the first element, our orientation begins with a session on “Understanding Your Responsibility Towards Clients and Society.” Clinic allows students to navigate the demands of real-life legal practice in a setting where clients are facing numerous odds in exercising their legal rights in the current system. However, I find that students need to be grounded in lived experiences of their clients first. For many of my clinical colleagues and me, a poverty simulation is one way to further perspective taking. This simulation will be followed up with discussion questions where students are reflecting upon the choices they were required to make, what circumstances influenced those choices, and what they may have done differently with a changed piece of their identity or additional resource.

The second step in orienting the students towards care of others requires a thoughtful discussion about one’s fiduciary responsibility as counsel. This can begin with a reflective exercise about a student’s own life where they look for experiences being in the care of another or taking care of someone else. These may be life experiences of seeking medical care, customer service, babysitting, caring for a sick relative, being a parent, or a prior career. Reflecting on their own life, a discussion can follow about lawyer’s specific responsibilities and how they relate to the fiduciary responsibility we take on for clients. This discussion will be grounded in the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct, specifically the preamble. This exercise should set the tone for their identity as lawyers who are in service of others.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that a one-time conversation is not sufficient to develop care orientation. After the perspective-taking exercises are introduced in orientation, students will be equipped to revisit these ideas as they move through their clinic work. Typically, clinic students carry lower caseloads than in practice, so it affords them the ability to connect on a deeper level with a client and gain empathy and understanding for a client’s unique lived experience and their actual needs.  During the year, individual supervision conversations can revisit the orientation discussions and further reinforce their care towards others.

By the end of the year, students are well equipped to engage in conversations critically assessing the legal system, identifying shortcomings, and proposing solutions. For example, many clinics end the year with a seminar dedicated to reflecting upon challenges their clients faced in accessing the courts, coupled with a brainstorming session on potential solutions.[1] This allows students to connect what may be frustrating realizations about “justice” to tangible solutions, thus beginning to develop their capacity to effectuate systemic change.

Developing Major Competencies

The second element includes making students aware of major competencies that clients, employers, and the legal system need. These competencies include client-centered relational skills, problem-solving, and good judgment. The goal is not only to make students aware of these competencies, and their importance, but also to internalize ownership of their own development in these areas.

The second session in our orientation introduces the students to one core competency: client-centered lawyering. Through a thoughtful exercise called “the Rich Aunt” students begin to consider how personal values drive human decision making and students begin to reframe the role of a lawyer from just an advocate to also that of a client-centered counselor.[2] This exercise has students consider a hypothetical scenario where they are lined up to receive a substantial inheritance but have to evaluate if they want to settle for a lower amount or go to trial and potentially obtain more. The students evaluate what factors drove them to their decision, and then reflect on how personal the decision was. This is then connected to choices a client may make and the value in respecting the client’s ability to decide.

After orientation, this client-centered perspective is reinforced during deeper seminars on counseling and interviewing skills. In future years, we intend to broaden the pre-semester orientation to also cover these topics so the foundation to these core competencies is uniformly reinforced across the clinical program. Finally, during the semester or year, students will deepen these skills within a clinical methodology that is structured to engage a student in learning the why behind their choices, reflecting upon their choices, and drawing strategies to implement in their legal practice. This is often done in a non-directive supervision model that is designed to maximize their opportunities for developing into a self-reflective practitioner.[3]  This  supervision model is not often available in traditional internship or externship positions.

Establishing Well-Being Practices

The final element of well-being practices goes beyond teaching self-care practices but instead looks at three core needs of the being: “(1) autonomy (to feel in control of one’s own goals and behavior); (2) competence (to feel one has the needed skills, including physical and mental skills to be successful); and (3) relatedness (to experience a sense of belonging or attachment to other people).”[4] Autonomy requires a student to understand their values, be able to express those values, and hence know where they are in control of their goals and behaviors. Hence, developing one’s sense of self as a person becomes foundational to developing the other necessary identities of a lawyer.

The pre-semester orientation will target this element in a third session focused on “maintaining well-being in a live-client setting.” In this session, we will examine the two elements that make up one’s professional quality of life: compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue. Then, we will introduce a tool called the “Professional Quality of Life Survey” that allows students to self-evaluate the different aspects that affect their quality of life. The Professional Quality of Life Survey is a free tool developed and refined through years of research on what affects a helper’s ability to continue their work. The Center for Victims of Torture owns the tool and provides it free (along with incredible teaching resources) to help anyone working in a helper-oriented profession.

While the results of the survey may be very private, students will not be required to share the results with anyone but can if they choose. I’ve found that the more ways we can provide students a space to discuss boundaries and personal challenges affecting their lawyering, we can assist them in developing skills to navigate issues that are inevitably going to arise in their lives. In private supervision, if a student chooses to share the results of the survey, together we can examine their trends and explore ways to improve their holistic satisfaction. The reality is that no one ever works in a vacuum: our personal lives and experiences come with us to our jobs and influence our work more than we often realize.

Hopefully, like us at Pitt Law, many other schools can utilize the revised ABA standards to bring attention to the strengths of their clinical programs. If anything, there is a wealth of information in clinical pedagogy—it just needs to be tapped.

If you have any questions or comments in response to this post, then please feel free to email at JZA16@pitt.edu.

Jabeen Adawi is Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Family Law Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

[1] In “Teaching The Clinic Seminar” text by Deborah Epstein, Jane Aiken, and Wallace Mlyniec (three seminal clinical instructors from the Georgetown University Law Center), Chapter 21, “Exploring Justice” offers one thoughtful example of a framework for discussing justice in a clinical seminar. Another example is in Sue Bryant and Jean Koh Peters’ online repository for clinical law teaching materials “Talking about Race”, where they provide tools for facilitating conversations around racial justice.

[2] Deborah Epstein, Jane Aiken, Wallace Mlyniec, Teaching the Clinic Seminar 56 (2014) (describing the “Rich Aunt” exercise).

[3] See David Chavkin, Clinical Methodology in Clinical Legal Education: A Textbook for Law School Clinical Programs 7 (2002); Serge A. Martinez, Why are We Doing This? Cognitive Science and Nondirective Supervision in Clinical Teaching, 26 Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy 24 (2016) (discussing the non-directive supervision model).

[4] Neil Hamilton, Louis Bilionis, Revised ABA Standards 303(b) and (c) and the Formation of a Lawyer’s Professional Identity, Part 1: Understanding the New Requirements (May 2022).

October 3, 2022 by
Megan Bess

A Simple Professional Identity Formation Assignment Ideal for Externship and/or Clinical Courses

By: Megan Bess, Director of the Externship Program and Assistant Professor of Law,
University of Illinois Chicago School of Law

Reflective assignments will be a key tool for law schools as they implement ABA Standard 303’s call for professional identity formation. For the past few years, our school’s externship program has used a simple assignment and associated rubric to encourage students to reflect on the skills and competencies they will need as attorneys. While this was designed for use in our externship seminars, it can be easily adapted for any course with a goal of having students reflect on the responsibilities of an attorney and associated skills and competencies.

I originally created this assignment to get students thinking about the skills and competencies identified in the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System Foundations for Practice Study, as well as those outlined by Neil Hamilton in his study of law firm competency models. I present students with these materials at the outset to give them broader context for what they might seek to observe and develop during their externship experience. This assignment can be easily adapted for reflection on other skills and competencies using different resources, including, for example, the Shultz-Zedeck Lawyering Effectiveness Factors or the newer IAALS study on skills and competencies, Thinking Like a Client. The goal is to get students to think about the non-legal skills and competencies essential for lawyering and to reflect on how those skills resonate with them. With the traditional law school focus on analytical skills and “thinking like a lawyer,” students are often surprised to learn that many general professional skills and competencies are highly valued by legal employers. The research behind each of the resources listed above is critical to bringing credibility to the skills and proving their value to students. This assignment is a series of simple questions which ask students to reflect on those skills and competencies. The prompts in this assignment seek to have students identify and explain:

  • Which skills/competencies resonate with them and why;
  • Their reactions to the skills employers value (those that are both surprising and expected);
  • Examples of others who demonstrate skills/competencies in professional settings;
  • A concrete example showing they have mastered at least one skill/competency; and
  • A skill/competency they need to improve or develop.

As the associated rubric indicates, there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. This can be a little disconcerting for law students, who are often accustomed to questions requiring more definitive responses. The rubric focuses on the quality and depth of the reflection. As we discuss the skills and competencies in our externship classes, I always remind students that when grading these answers, it is easy to distinguish between genuine and honest reflection and those that are simply “going through the motions.”

This type of reflection on lawyering skills and competencies can be especially powerful during an externship or clinical experience. Students form their professional identities by internalizing a profession’s values and responsibility to others—a process which occurs most powerfully when students participate in practice settings and see the values and behaviors of members of the profession.[i] As Tim Floyd and Kendall Kerew observed, it is while participating in this type of experiential learning that students really examine their progress in developing the professional identity of a lawyer.

Please feel free to use any part of this assignment or rubric that is useful to you. Like all my assignments and rubrics, these continue to evolve over time. If you have questions, comments, or ideas for improvement, please reach out to me at mbess@uic.edu.

Megan Bess is the Director of the Externship Program and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.

Need other ideas for reflective prompts to aid in professional identity formation? Check out Neil Hamilton and Jerry Organ’s article that includes 30 questions designed to aid in professional identity formation.

[i] See Yvonne Steinert, Educational Theory and Strategies to Support Professionalism & Professional Identity Formation, in Teaching Medical Professionalism, Richard Cruess et al., Teaching Medical Professionalism 72 (Richard Cruess et al. eds. (2d ed. 2016)); Ann Colby & William M. Sullivan, Formation of Professionalism and Purpose: Perspectives from the Preparation for the Professions Program, 5 U. St. Thomas L.J. 404, 420-21 (2008).

September 30, 2022 by
Louis Bilionis, Neil Hamilton

Latest Article from Bilionis and Hamilton on ABA Revisions of 303(b) and (c) Published by NALP’s Professional Development Quarterly

NALP just published the third and final installment of Louis Bilionis and Neil Hamilton’s three-part series on the Standard 303 revisions. Part 1 and Part 2 appeared in the May and June 2022 editions of NALP’s PDQ, respectively.

The last article in the series, which is titled “Revised ABA Standards 303 (b) and (c) and the Formation of a Lawyer’s Professional Identity, Part 3: Cross-Cultural Competency, Equal Access, and the Elimination of Bias, Discrimination, and Racism,” can be read here.

September 28, 2022 by
Eliza Vorenberg, Suzanne Harrington-Steppen

Law School Pro Bono Programs: Opportunities To Reflect On What It Means To Be A Lawyer

By: Suzanne Harrington-Steppen, Associate Director of Pro Bono Programs and Clinical Professor of Law, Roger Williams University School of Law

Eliza Vorenberg, Director of Pro Bono Programs and Community Partnerships and Clinical Professor of Law, Roger Williams University School of Law

Law school pro bono programs, whether mandatory or voluntary, offer rich opportunities for students to develop their professional identities as lawyers. Roger Williams University School of Law (RWU Law) has a mandatory 50-hour Pro Bono Experiential Learning requirement. The requirement falls under our “public service” learning outcome and reflects our commitment to teaching our law students about the legal profession’s responsibility: (1) to improve access to the legal system and the quality of justice; and (2) to provide pro bono legal service in law practice to those who cannot afford legal services.

For many law students, pro bono experiences are their first opportunity to play the role of lawyer and reflect on what they are seeing in the profession and how it feels to be a part of the profession. About 40% of our first-year law students engage in a pro bono experience before they finish their first year. But, as we know, experience alone isn’t enough to help students integrate and reflect on the values and norms of the profession as they relate to public service. Law schools are uniquely situated to help students develop their professional identities by providing critical context for their pro bono service.  Law schools can both teach students how pro bono service is central to the profession and also provide them with space to reflect on and process their pro bono experiences in relation to how they see themselves as future members of the profession.

Setting the Stage: Access to and Quality of Justice

Last year, when introducing our law school’s pro bono requirement and programmatic opportunities to first-year law students, we moved away from the traditional “information session” format to a session focused on educating and encouraging law students to think critically about what it means to be a lawyer and how public service and pro bono fit into their future responsibilities and the profession’s values.

We began our session asking our 1Ls to remember the following critically important questions throughout their law school experience, in and outside of the classroom, and throughout their careers:

Who has access to justice?  Who doesn’t? Why or why not?

What is the quality of justice being administered? How do we evaluate the quality of justice being administered in civil versus criminal contexts?

We intentionally decided to start our session with these questions because the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility makes it clear that all lawyers, not just public interest lawyers or lawyers who are self-motivated to give back, have a special responsibility for ensuring access to, and the quality of, justice.  Before we can teach law students about Rule 6.1 or the goals and contours of our law school’s pro bono requirement students need to be told explicitly what a lawyer’s role in society is beyond advocating for their clients. We teach our law students that grappling with these questions and then doing something to fix deficiencies in the legal system are a lawyer’s duty as a member of this profession, not some lofty dream. We also provide students with an overview of the justice gap, using the Academy for Arts & Sciences video entitled “The Civil Justice Gap”.  We explain that pro bono service, as defined by Rule 6.1, is one way to take ownership of their professional responsibility to improve access to justice and the quality of justice for all but that there are many other ways they should be thinking about their role as lawyers in our society. This subtle shift in how we introduce the topic of pro bono asks law students to critique our justice system—using the access and quality framework—from the beginning of their law school journey, to identify who benefits and who is hurt by our systems of justice, and to be aware of the bias and inequities built into those systems.

Providing a Pause: Space for Reflection

Externship pedagogy, particularly its emphasis on structured reflection, can be very helpful in thinking about how law schools can design and structure their pro bono programs to promote professional identity formation opportunities. Pro bono experiences with reflective components offer meaningful opportunities for students to process and think deeply about what they are seeing, experiencing, and feeling while engaged in pro bono service and to connect it to their personal identities and lived experiences.

At RWU Law, each law student must submit a one-page written reflection in response to specific prompts after they have completed a pro bono experience they plan to use to meet our graduation requirement. In the past, we have provided prompts to students focused on the type of pro bono/public service experience, e.g., a prompt regarding working directly with clients, or for judicial experiences, the student’s observations regarding access to justice in the courts. This year, with the changes to Standard 303 in mind, we revised our pro bono reflection prompts to directly engage law students in a reflection focused on how the law student’s pro bono experience fits into their professional identity development.

In addition to requiring a written reflection, we intentionally funnel our first-year law students into pro bono opportunities that the law school has developed, facilitates, and oversees, e.g., Alternative Spring Break, Street Law, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA), and an Eviction Help Desk. This allows us to facilitate in-person reflective meetings throughout the experience and provide more structure than simply matching the law student with an external community partner. Many law schools may not have the resources to have faculty or staff facilitating in-person reflective meetings but at a minimum law schools should consider asking for or requiring a written reflection as a way students can intentionally think about their professional development.

Whether voluntary or mandatory, law school pro bono programming is an excellent vehicle for facilitating law students’ professional identity formation consistent with the revisions to ABA Standard 303(b).

Suzanne Harrington-Steppen is the Associate Director of Pro Bono Programs and Clinical Professor of Law at Roger Williams University School of Law.

Eliza Vorenberg is the Director of Pro Bono Programs and Community Partnerships, and is Clinical Professor of Law at Roger Williams University School of Law.

If you have any questions or comments in response to this post, then please feel free to email either or both of us at sharrington-steppen@rwu.edu and evorenberg@rwu.edu.

September 26, 2022 by
Daisy Floyd

Professional Identity: What is It?

By: Daisy Hurst Floyd, University Professor of Law and Ethical Formation and former Dean, Mercer University School of Law

I’ve been thinking about the lawyer’s professional identity and legal education’s role in developing that identity for almost two decades.  Through it all, I’ve struggled with two questions. First, what do we really mean when we use the term “professional identity?  Second, how should our work overlap with lawyers’ identities outside of their professional roles?  It seems that we lack a clear, shared definition of professional identity; much of the work on professional identity formation, including my own, has been more about the why and how than the what. In this piece, I offer some thoughts about the what. In two later postings, I will address the why and how.

The two questions above occupied much of my summer as I worked on a forthcoming book about professional identity.  My research led me to develop a model that addresses both what we mean when we talk about professional identity and also its overlap with personal identity. This posting describes that model; I welcome your reaction to it.

In our book, THE PATH FROM STUDENT TO LAWYER: THE FORMATION OF PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY, my colleagues Pat Longan, Tim Floyd, and I used the following definition of professional identity: it is a lawyer’s deep sense of self in role, which allows the lawyer to fulfill the public purposes of the profession and live a life of fulfillment and satisfaction.  This definition places our work within virtue ethics and claims that identity is a matter of character.  It also connects a particular kind of identity with the desired outcomes of ethical action and well-being.

While this definition focuses helpfully on the lawyer in professional role, it lacks full consideration of a person’s deep sense of self outside of that role. After all, a sense of self in role as a lawyer is just one part, albeit a large one, of any lawyer’s overall deep sense of self.  All of us inhabit multiple roles in our lives, and a lawyer’s professional identity exists in that broader context.  We know that when a lawyer’s identity in other roles is not consistent with their professional identity, the resulting dissonance is likely to result in unethical behavior and a lack of well-being.  It is therefore incumbent upon us to help our students situate their evolving professional identities within their overall identities.  To do that, we need to be informed by understandings of identity outside of the particular context of professional identity.

During the twentieth century, social scientists addressed a question that had occupied philosophers for centuries: What does it take to lead a good life in which one is a good person (acts ethically) and flourishes (experiences satisfaction and fulfillment)?  This is really the same question that we are asking about professional identity: what does it take for a lawyer to lead a good life, one in which the lawyer is effective and ethical and also flourishes?

A synthesis of the literature on virtue ethics, identity, and character reveals three components of a sense of self that will support a good life across multiple roles.  These three components can help us understand professional identity.  They are: (1) internalization of certain essential core virtues; (2) cultivation of individual strengths and understanding of individual traits; and (3) a purpose that informs actions and provides meaning.

Core virtues

Virtue ethics posits that a person must internalize certain virtues to be a person of good character.  Aristotle famously developed a list of such virtues, and that list has been debated and revised since by philosophers, theologians, and social scientists.  Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, leaders in the field of positive psychology, have identified six essential core virtues, finding “a surprising amount of similarity across cultures and…a historical and cross-cultural convergence” around these virtues. According to them, a person who internalizes these six virtues will be a person of good character and likely to live a life of ethical action and fulfillment.  All six are essential; if any is missing, a person will not be a person of good character.

The six core virtues (which they call “the Big Six”) are:

  • wisdom: the acquisition and use of knowledge;
  • courage: the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal;
  • humanity: interpersonal strengths that involve tending and befriending others;
  • justice: healthy community life;
  • temperance: protection against excess; and
  • transcendence: forging connections to the larger universe and providing meaning.

Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, CHARACTER STRENGTHS AND VIRTUES: A HANDBOOK AND CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM (Oxford Univ. Press 2004).

Individual Strengths and Traits

As essential as the core virtues are, however, they are not the total of a person’s identity.  Each of us is different from every other person and possesses individual traits, which make up the second component of identity.  Some traits are strengths that will support implementation of the core virtues, while other traits may present challenges.  Some traits are inherent and even immutable, such as musical talent, shyness, or athletic ability.  Others are more malleable, such as messiness, a dislike of confrontation, or a tendency to procrastinate.

Peterson and Seligman have identified twenty-four character strengths, each supportive of a particular core virtue.  They include such traits as creativity and open-mindedness (supportive of wisdom): persistence and integrity (courage); love and social intelligence (humanity); humility and self-regulation (temperance); citizenship and leadership (justice); and gratitude and hope (transcendence).  Most people can readily identify between three and seven of these strengths as their own, which Peterson and Seligman label “signature strengths.” A signature strength is one that “a person owns, celebrates, and frequently exercises.”

While no one is likely to possess all twenty-four, they have found that a person who possesses at least one strength within each virtue will be a person of good character.  No one is likely to possess all, but their research indicates that most people possess at least two within each virtue.

Purpose

The third component of a healthy sense of self is purpose. It builds upon the first two, but it is greater than the sum of the parts.  A purpose allows a person to live congruently with the sense of self that has evolved from internalization of the core virtues and the appropriate traits.  Without a purpose, one is unlikely to live an ethical life and find fulfillment, even if they possess the core virtues and essential strengths.

Self-determination theory helps us understand the relationship between purpose and identity through its research on motivation.  A person is intrinsically motivated when their actions are either inherently enjoyable or help fulfill an important goal in their lives.  For example, a person may spend time with friends or exercise because those things are inherently enjoyable.  However, they will spend time cleaning trash from the side of the road, not because it is inherently enjoyable but because it fulfills a purpose of caring for the environment.  In contrast, a person is extrinsically motivated when acting to please someone else, earn a reward, or avoid something unpleasant, such as guilt, anger, or pain.  Everyone experiences both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, but a person who is primarily motivated by intrinsic motivations is more likely to act ethically and experience fulfillment than one who is motivated primarily by extrinsic motivation.  One who is primarily motivated by extrinsic values is likely to experience angst and distress.

Without a guiding purpose, people are more likely to give into pressure to act inconsistently with their identities because they don’t know themselves well enough to act primarily out of intrinsic motivations.  Likewise, a person who has not taken the time to develop the foundational virtues may have a desire to resist extrinsic motivations but will find it hard to do so because of failure to internalize the virtues that support such action.  For example, without courage, it will be difficult to resist extrinsic motivations even in the face of conflicting intrinsic ones.

Sophie, an entering law student

To illustrate this model of identity, we can imagine Sophie, an entering law student.  Sophie describes herself this way: “I am friendly, opinionated, and stubborn.  I do my best to be kind to others, but sometimes my stubbornness makes it hard to be patient when I disagree with someone or think they are doing something they shouldn’t.  I have a good sense of humor, but sometimes I show that through sarcasm, which can be hurtful when I don’t intend it to be.  I care about others, and I feel good when I do things that make life better for others.  I am quiet and a bit shy; I like to read and be by myself for at least part of every day, even though I also enjoy being with friends and family.  I value honesty and believe that it is important not to compromise my ethical values.  I want to be a friend that others can always rely upon.  I don’t like conflict and prefer that everyone get along.  I am learning to stand up for myself and others when necessary, even when confronting others is uncomfortable, but I want to continue to get better at it because sometimes I let things go that I shouldn’t.  I am curious and like to travel to learn about other cultures, but my shyness sometimes prevents me from taking full advantage of being in new situations.  I believe that we are all connected in some way and engage in spiritual practices that are important to me.  Because I want to improve my community, I was a student government officer and involved in a couple of nonprofit community organizations in college.  I am a good athlete and was really successful in high school and college sports.  I lack musical ability, but I appreciate good music, love to go to concerts, and have an interest in learning about singer-songwriters and their work.  I don’t like animals, and I’ve never wanted a pet.  I’ve always liked to be around children and thought about being an elementary school teacher.  I want to do good work in the world that is useful to others, but I’m not sure what that will be.”

Sophie’s answer tells us a lot about her.  As an introvert, Sophie knows that being in social situations will require that she take some time to be alone to restore her energy; an extrovert will know that too much alone time will be draining and that they need to schedule time for interactions with others.  Sophie recognizes that her personality traits of stubbornness and conflict avoidance may present challenges to being the person she wants to be.  Because Sophie is curious about the world and likes to travel, she will make different decisions about how to spend her time and money than someone who does not enjoy or value traveling.  Because Sophie values spiritual practices, she will schedule time to participate in such practices, just as she spends times in student government or volunteer positions.  She will not spend her time or money on pets.

We also see that Sophie inhabits different roles in her life—she is a friend, family member, leader, student, and volunteer.  Sophie’s sense of self will affect how she handles each of these roles, and it will allow her to live authentically across multiple roles even as her identity might manifest differently across those roles.

Sophie’s response demonstrates the requisites for a good life.  First, she reveals all six of the core virtues: wisdom, courage, justice, transcendence, humanity, and temperance.  Second, we see at least nine of the twenty-four essential strengths: curiosity, persistence, integrity, kindness, fairness, appreciation of excellence, humor, self-regulation, and spirituality.  Sophie is aware of individual traits that sometimes are not strengths.  She dislikes conflict, which might support kindness, but also could prevent honesty or integrity.  Her humor can transgress into hurtful sarcasm, and her stubbornness may impede her ability to listen or empathize.  Finally, Sophie has articulated a purpose for her life. She wants to do good work and be useful to others, even as she is unsure what form that purpose will take.

Sophie, like most of our students, enters law school with a healthy sense of self that will continue to develop over a lifetime. Our collective task is to help her both cultivate a new professional identity and to integrate that identity with the evolving sense of self that informs the other roles in her life.  We want her to internalize the professional virtues, to acquire strengths that support the virtues while being aware of traits that may impede them, and to develop a professional purpose.  Importantly, we want Sophie to develop a professional identity that is consistent with her identity across the other roles in her life, avoiding the dissonance that can otherwise occur.  To paraphrase Atticus Finch, we want Sophie to be “the same person in town and at home.”

If we apply the three part model of identity across roles to professional identity, we can identify three analogous component parts:

Core virtues of the Profession

Much like Peterson and Seligman’s “Big Six” core virtues, Pat Longan has identified six core virtues of the legal profession. They are:

  • competence: commitment to excellence, including legal knowledge, skill, diligence, and judgment;
  • fidelity to the client: fulfillment of the duty of utmost good faith and devotion to the client—a fiduciary disposition;
  • fidelity to the law: faithfulness to the law and its institutions;
  • public-spiritedness: commitment to public service, including ensuring access to justice and appropriate self-regulation of the profession;
  • civility: a commitment to be courteous, cooperative, and honest and not to engage in abusive tactics;
  • practical wisdom: the master virtue, allowing the deployment of the other virtues in particular situations in the right amounts, in the right way, and for the right reasons.

Each of these six virtues is essential to being a good lawyer, and internalizing each will support ethical action and well-being.  Just as with the Big Six core virtues, if any one of these is missing from a lawyer’s identity, that identity will be incomplete. Sophie’s developing professional identity must include exposure to the core virtues of the profession and opportunities to internalize and practice them.

Individual strengths and traits

To live out the six virtues, a lawyer must also develop particular lawyering strengths, and we can turn to numerous sources to discover what strengths are necessary to support a lawyer’s professional identity. cFor example, Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers’ comprehensive surveys of lawyers identifies over 70 attributes that a lawyer needs upon entry into the profession.  Shultz and Zedeck identified a list of 26 lawyering effectiveness factors, and Hamilton and Bilionis synthesize the literature to develop their three-sided model for professional formation.  Some of the identified strengths include those traditionally taught in law school, including legal research, legal analysis and judgment, and oral and written communication skills.  Others are only now being recognized as essential, such as grit and resilience; teamwork; a growth mindset; commitment to continued excellence; empathy; and listening.

Sophie’s professional identity is fostered as she develops these numerous essential strengths, but she must also be aware of individual traits that might challenge her professional identity.  For example, Sophie can be stubborn and unyielding when she thinks she’s right.  That can be a strength as a lawyer if channeled into resilience or fortitude, but it will interfere with good lawyering if it impedes listening or empathy.  Her tendency to avoid conflict could impede the virtues of fidelity to the client if she is unable to be a sufficient advocate, or impede the virtue of fidelity to the law if she is reluctant to tell her client that something the client wants to do is unethical.  Our support of Sophie’s developing professional identity should include helping her cultivate the strengths that support the six virtues, identify those traits that present challenges, and practice overcoming the challenges.

Purpose

Finally, Sophie’s professional identity will include a purpose for her professional life.  In law school and beyond, she will discern how her role as lawyer can be used consistently with the core personal and professional virtues and her individual strengths and traits.  It may be that Sophie won’t thrive as a litigator even if she has strong advocacy or communication skills because she dislikes conflict and is an introvert.  Nor is she likely to be happy devoting her life to animal rights, despite its importance, as she expresses a dislike for animals.  Sophie may, however, find great satisfaction in working to strengthen education, eliminate child abuse, or reform juvenile law.  Her appreciation of music may allow her to thrive in legal work for artists.

Larry Krieger and Kennon Sheldon have demonstrated the importance of purpose to professional identity.  Their research shows that lawyers with the greatest well-being are primarily motivated by intrinsic values and that the extrinsic values of law school, such as grades, class rank, and law review membership do not correlate with well-being.  Yet, they have also shown that law school rapidly shifts students from intrinsic to extrinsic motivations.  We need to make students aware of the pitfalls that follow from that shift and give them the tools and space to listen for their purpose. Lawrence S. Krieger and Kennon M. Sheldon, What Makes Lawyers Happy?: A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, 83 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 554 (2015).

Frederick Buechner’s well known definition of vocation as the place where one’s “deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” is affirmed by empirical research. Sophie could be doing great good in the world, but if what she is doing is not aligned with the core personal and professional virtues and her individual strengths and traits, she is unlikely to thrive and is likely to give in to unethical behavior.  If, however, Sophie’s professional work aligns with her identity—both as a lawyer and across the other roles in her life—she is more likely to lead a life in which she acts ethically, fulfills the public purposes of the profession, and is fulfilled.  That benefits us all.

Conclusion

We all want our students to live lives of ethical action and well-being.  By focusing on the “what” of professional identity, we move closer to that goal.

Daisy Floyd is the University Professor of Law and Ethical Formation, and also the former Dean at Mercer University School of Law.

September 23, 2022 by
Karen Tokarz

Mandatory 1L Negotiation Class and Upper-Class Dispute Resolution Courses Address Professional Identity, Bias, and Cross-Cultural Competency

By: Karen Tokarz, Charles Nagel Professor of Public Interest Law & Policy, Director of the Negotiation & Dispute Resolution Programs, and Director of the Civil Rights & Mediation Clinic, Washington University School of Law

Washington University Law School is striving to address the revised ABA Standards of 303(b) and 303(c) in multiple ways. The law school utilizes a short course on Negotiation, which we have required for 1Ls for over a decade. It is offered each year in August and January. As set forth in the syllabus, one of the four days focuses on professional identity, bias, and cross-cultural competency. This course offers a unique way of introducing 1L students to these issues via education, experiential learning, negotiation partner feedback, and self-reflection.

In addition, all of our upper-class dispute resolution courses explicitly address professional identity, bias, and cross-cultural competency, especially Cross-Cultural Dispute Resolution, which is offered both semesters.

Below are links to the syllabi of the Negotiation course and Cross-Cultural Dispute Resolution, followed by the text of each syllabi.

1L Negotiation Class Syllabus

Cross-Cultural Dispute Resolution Syllabus

Washington University School of Law Required 1L Negotiation Course (1cr.)
Class Schedule, Objectives, Learning Outcomes, and Assignments
All times are approximate

Course Objectives/Learning Outcomes:

Negotiation is the most commonly used form of legal dispute resolution in the United States and around the world. This required course is designed to introduce students to the basics of negotiation through reading, discussion, simulation exercises, and videos. The course focuses on negotiation theory, negotiation skills, lawyer (agent)/client (principal) dynamics, negotiating in teams, and negotiation ethics.

The ability to participate successfully in legal negotiations rests on a combination of five core skills that students will begin to develop in this course: 1) theoretical understanding; 2) interpersonal and intrapersonal awareness; 3) planning; 4) drafting; and 5) reflection. This course provides students with a set of conceptual frameworks and practice experiences that will enhance understanding and skill level in these areas, from the various perspectives of negotiators, advocates, and clients in negotiations.

This introductory course lays the foundation for learning in upper-level negotiation and dispute resolution courses, as well as doctrinal courses. The course introduces issues of leadership, professional identity, bias, cross-cultural competency and cross-cultural humility. The course also helps prepare students for negotiation and dispute resolution issues soon to be added to the multi-state bar exam.

Course Requirements:

  • Attendance will be taken at the beginning of each class Because this is a short, one-credit class, anyone who is not present for all four days will not earn credit for the class and will be required to retake it at another time.
  • There is no final examination for this course, but there is required reading and four required short Students may discuss the assignments with each other but must draft the assignments individually. Students are urged to use their own words in response to the questions. Students are not required to footnote references to the assigned books, other than an initial reference, unless using direct quotations. Students must submit each of their four papers via Canvas before the beginning of each class and receive a passing mark on each paper to pass the course. Students who fail to submit passing papers before the beginning of each class will not earn credit for the course and will be required to retake it at another time.

In addition to the four required papers, there are other short assignments, including a Negotiation Self-Analysis & Partner Feedback Form following each Students must submit passing papers related to the negotiations by the conclusion of each class to pass the course.

ABA Standard 310:

ABA Standard 310 requires “not less than one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and two hours of out-of-class student work per week or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time” for each credit hour awarded.” This course is designed to meet this requirement, and each student is expected to spend no less than 42.5 hours of total work per credit hour.

Texts:

Students must read Roger Fisher & William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (any edition) before beginning the course. Assigned readings in addition to Getting to Yes will be available on the course Canvas page. Students are strongly encouraged to read the additional readings before beginning the course. Each day’s module on Canvas will include assigned readings and relevant handouts and links.

Tuesday August 23: Negotiation Theories, Strategies, and Styles

Class Schedule:

1:00-2:00         Introduction to the Course and Overview of Day
2:00-2:35         First Negotiation Exercise: The Gallery
2:35-2:45         Share Reflections with Other Side
2:45-2:55         Break
2:55-3:30         Analysis of First Exercise
3:30-4:30         Discussion of Getting to Yes and Theories of Negotiation

Assignment: Please read the entirety of Roger Fisher & William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (any edition). Please come to class prepared to discuss the reading and to pose two comments or questions.

To be eligible for credit for the course, students must submit before the beginning of class via Canvas a Pre-Negotiation Course Profile, along with a written memo of minimum four (4) pages, maximum five (5) pages, that addresses the questions below. Please use 12 pt. Times New Roman font, 1.5 spacing. In your memo, please answer the following questions:

  1. What are the downsides of bargaining solely over positions in a negotiation? Why and how could one shift the focus from positions to underlying interests in a negotiation?
  2. Compare distributive bargaining to problem-solving negotiation. Can lawyers change adversarial bargaining to problem-solving in disputes and deals without risking exploitation? What comparative benefits do you think lawyers bring to negotiations?
  3. Identify various kinds of interpersonal and intrapersonal people problems that might occur in a negotiation. Why and how could one separate people from the problem in a negotiation? Why and how could one invent and use options for mutual gain in a negotiation? What are possible obstacles to inventing and using these options?
  4. Why and how could one develop and use objective criteria in a negotiation? Why and how could one develop and use their and the other side’s BATNA?
  5. What is the definition of a successful negotiation?
  6. What do you see as the biggest pro and the biggest con of the approach suggested in Getting to Yes.

Wednesday, August 24: Lawyer (Agent)/Client (Principal) Relationships, Professional Identity, Confidentiality, Negotiation Ethics

Class Schedule:

1:00-2:10         Discussion of Readings and Overview of Day
2:10-2:30         Prepare for Second Negotiation Exercise (with same party)
2:35-2:45         Break
2:45-3:30         Second Negotiation Exercise: Client Interview/Retainer Agreement
3:30-3:40         Share Reflections with Other Side
3:40-4:30         Analysis of Second Exercise

Assignment: Please read the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (focus on the Preamble and Rules 1, 4, and 8); read pp. 95-138 in Art Hinshaw & Jess K. Albert, Doing the Right Thing: An Empirical Study of Attorney Negotiation Ethics; and read Beyond Words (and complete the short listening test at the end of that article).

Please come to class prepared to discuss the readings and to pose two comments or questions. To be eligible for credit for the course, students must submit before the beginning of class via Canvas a completed listening test (located at the end of the Beyond Words article), plus a written memo of minimum three (3) pages, maximum four (4) pages, that addresses the below questions. Please use 12 pt. Times New Roman font, 1.5 spacing. In your memo, please answer the following questions:

  1. What are potential professional and ethical dilemmas for lawyers (agents) when engaged in negotiations on behalf of clients (principals)?
  2. Why do you think lawyers violate rules such as Model Rules 1, 4, or 8?
  3. Can lawyers and/or clients lie in negotiations? What are the risks, rewards?
  4. What is the role of confidentiality in legal negotiations?
  5. What does it mean for a lawyer to listen beyond the words? What does it mean to lawyer “with” your client, rather than “for” your client? What is client-centered lawyering?

Thursday, August 25: Bias, Cultural Competence, Cultural Humility

Class Schedule:

1:00-1:40         Discussion of Readings and Overview of Day
1:40-2:00         Prepare for Third Negotiation Exercise (with partner)
2:00-2:40        Third Negotiation Exercise: Sally Soprano
2:40-2:50        Share Reflections
2:50-3:00        Break
3:00-4:00        Analysis of Third Exercise
4:00-4:30         Joint Planning for Fourth Exercise (with same party)

Assignment: Please read Sue Bryant and Jean Koh Peters, Five Habits for Cross-Cultural Lawyering.

Please come to class prepared to discuss the readings and to pose two comments or questions. To be eligible for credit for the course, students must submit before the beginning of class via Canvas a written memo of minimum two (2) pages, maximum three (3) pages, that addresses the below questions. Please use 12 pt. Times New Roman font, 1.5 spacing. In your memo, please answer the following questions:

  1. In what ways might bias and culture influence lawyering with clients and others, and what potential issues might arise for you in client interactions and negotiations?
  2. What are your biggest insights/take-a-ways as to each of the five habits for cross-cultural lawyering that you might use to help identify your biases and cultural norms, and those of your clients and others, to enhance your communications and negotiations?

Friday, August 26: The Art of Persuasion

Class Schedule:

1:00-1:40         Discussion of Video and Overview of Day
1:40-1:50   Prepare for Fourth Exercise (with partner)
1:50-3:00   Fourth Exercise: Multi-Party Negotiation
3:00-3:10   Share Reflections
3:10-3:20     Break
3:20-4:30    Analysis of Fourth Exercise, Concluding Lecture, Next Steps to Improve as a Negotiator

Assignment: Please watch the first 17 minutes of Mr. Rogers and the Power of Persuasion , http://www.youtube.com/watch?y=_DGdDQrXy5U (link also available on Canvas), and read Carmine Gallo, The Art of Persuasion Hasn’t Changed in 2,000 Years, available at www.carminegallo.com/the-art-of-persuasion-hasnt-changed-in-2000-years/ Please come to class prepared to discuss the video and reading, and to pose two comments or questions as to how the art of persuasion is relevant to negotiations and dispute resolution.

To be eligible for credit for the course, students must submit before the beginning of class via Canvas a written negotiation plan of minimum two (2) pages, maximum three (3) pages. Please use 12 pt. Times New Roman font, 1.5 spacing. In your negotiation plan, please include four columns, one each for you and your partner and one each for the other side and her/his partner. Identify what you understand/guesstimate each side wants (substantive and relationship goals/ positions), why (underlying interests), how (optimal negotiation styles), cultural/ethical issues, options for achieving mutual gains as to substantive and relationship goals, information you want to obtain/retain, aspiration points, resistance points (bottom lines), and BATNAs.

Cross-Cultural Dispute Resolution Fall, 2022
Mondays, 9:00 AM – 10:52 AM Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room

Prof. Juan Del Valle juandelvalle@wustl.edu

SYLLABUS

CREDITS: 3.0

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Disputes and dispute resolution frequently involve cross-cultural conflict. Effective dispute resolution methods involve additional elements than those used in intra-culture adjudicatory and amicable dispute resolution processes. Through a harmonic integration of legal, sociological, psychological, and neurological concepts and findings, this course is designed to equip students with valuable tools that will allow them to choose suitable dispute resolution methods and strategies for resolving cross-cultural controversies, and managing legal conflicts involving individuals from diverse cultures and backgrounds, including but not limited to gender, religion, national origin, and race. The course is designed to enhance negotiation and dispute resolution skills by increasing cultural intelligence (CQ) for legal professionals who will be involved in diverse conflict resolution scenarios, whether as attorneys, negotiators, facilitators, or adjudicators. The course includes assigned readings, drafting, and simulations related to cross-cultural dispute resolution.

ABA STANDARD COMPLIANCE

ABA Standard 310 requires “not less than one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and two hours of out-of-class student work per week or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time” for each credit hour awarded. This course has been designed to meet this requirement, through the inclusion of mandatory readings, free research and assignments that will be explained during the course and a final essay, expecting each student to spend at least two hours of out-of-class time for each one hour of in-class-time per credit hour.

COURSE OBJECTIVES AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of the semester, students will be able to effectively:

  • Recognize and utilize techniques to communicate and collaborate with cross-cultural stakeholders about their cases, the law, and policy in negotiations and mediation processes;
  • Recognize and understand the existence of biases and their impact in information-collecting processes;
  • Acknowledge ways to control biases and other informational barriers sourced in the adaptive unconscious;
  • Recognize and understand the impact of context and the distribution of power in negotiations and mediations, including culture, gender, race, national origin, religion;
  • Identify and understand the underlying interests of all of the stakeholders in dispute resolution processes where cultural difference may add challenges to the collection of information;
  • Recognize and understand opportunities for and barriers for stakeholders to create and claim value on a sustainable basis in dispute resolution processes.
  • Recognize and understand the impact of intrapersonal and interpersonal styles, and persuasion techniques in negotiations and mediations involving cross-cultural interactions;
  • Identify and utilize necessary oral and written advocacy skills with and on behalf of stake- holders in negotiations and mediations involving cross-cultural interactions;
  • Enhance communication, relationship development, trust building, and persuasion skills in negotiations and mediations involving cross-cultural interactions;
  • Enhance collaboration skills and maximize effectiveness working as a team member to advance the interests of the stakeholders and the process in negotiations and mediations involving cross-cultural interactions;

ASSESSMENT AND GRADING

Students are expected to prepare for every class. Participation in class discussions and class exercises, including a final project will be highly graded and will be assigned twenty-five percent (25%) of the final grade. A final, anonymous essay of approximately 6 pages will have a seventy five percent (75%) weight on the grade.

READINGS AND EXERCISES

Students must read and prepare for a discussion of the assigned readings prior to each session and come to class prepared to actively participate in class discussions. Students are encouraged to read any additional material they find useful to complement lectures. The instructors may suggest complementary readings during the course.

ATTENDANCE POLICY

This is a participatory course. Its success depends on everyone’s active participation and preparation for the exercises that are assigned. Students are allowed to miss 2 classes without that absence negatively impacting their grade; provided that, (i) I am notified in advance of your expected absence (preferably at the previous class) and (ii) any materials you are required to turn in are delivered to me before the class you will miss. Failure to provide advanced notice of an absence, turn in any assignments prior to class or missing more than two classes (absent extreme circumstances approved by Elizabeth Walsh, Associate Dean for Student Services) will count as an unexcused absence. We can be notified about expected absences in class or by email. Unexcused absences will negatively impact both the class participation and performance portions of your grade.

SIMULATION EXERCISES & CASE STUDIES

We will have 2-4 exercises in the course of the semester.

For the simulations to be successful and allow you to develop your skills, it is important that they are approached as seriously as you would approach a real-life negotiation. It is also important that you maintain your assigned role, try to maximize the outcome of the party you are assigned and fully prepare for each simulation. Most of all, I want you to enjoy every single session of this course.

LAPTOP POLICY

Laptops may be used during class discussions to take notes and used during simulations if you are instructed to do so. At no time may laptops be used to surf the web or communicate about subjects not related to the class. Cell phones shall NOT be used at any time while class is in session to make calls, take in-coming calls, or text, except during class breaks. Use of laptops, cell phones, or other electronic devices during class at prohibited times is extremely distracting and reflects a lack of respect to your classmates and me and will result in a failing participation grade for that class session.

CLASS PARTICIPATION

Your final grade will be a combination of the following:
Weekly Class Attendance, Class Participation, and Final Project (25%)

Weekly Participation:

Your weekly class participation throughout the semester, as demonstrated through preparation and discussion of the assigned reading materials, active engagement in the simulations, and negotiation planning memos will be worth 25% of your grade.

Final Essay:

75% of your grade.

*Required Course Textbooks

Fisher, R., Ury, W. (2011). Getting to Yes: Reaching Agreements Without Giving In. New York, NY: Penguin Books. ISBN-10: 0143118757; ISBN-13: 978-0143118756.

Lewis, R. (2018). When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures. Boston, MA: Hachette Book Group. ISBN-10: 9781473684829; ISBN-13: 978-1473684829.

Randolph, P. (2016). The Psychology of Conflict: Mediating in a Diverse World. Bloomsbury Continuum. ISBN-10: 1472922972; ISBN-13: 978-1472922977.

*Required Additional Readings

Cairns, D. (2005). Mediating International Commercial Disputes: Differences in U.S. and Euro- pean Approaches. Dispute Resolution Journal. Aug-Oct, 2005; 60, 3. Available at http://www.nysba.org/workarea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=67718

Pair, Lara M. (2002). Cross-Cultural Arbitration: Do the Differences Between Cultures Still In- fluence International Commercial Arbitration despite Harmonization? ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law. Vol 9, Issue 1, Article 2. Available at https://nsuworks.nova.edu/il- sajournal/vol9/iss1/2/

*Suggested Complementary Readings

Groves, K., Feyerherm, A., Minhua, G. (2015). Examining Cultural Intelligence and Cross-Cul- tural Negotiation Effectiveness. Journal of Management Education, Vol. 39(2) 209-243. Available at www.sagepub.com.

Class Schedule and Assigned Mandatory Readings

Week 1: Basics of Legal Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

Readings: Fisher, R., Ury, W. (2011) Getting to Yes. Chapters I – IV.

Week 2: The Psychology of Conflict in Legal Dispute Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Existentialism, Psychological Perceptions in Conflicts, and the Impact of Emotions

Readings: Randolph, P. (2016). The Psychology of Conflict: Mediating in a Diverse World. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Chapters 1, 2, 3.

Week 3: The Psychology of Conflict in Legal Dispute Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Self-Esteem, Values and Polarities, Interpersonal Relationships, and Psychological Impact of Listening.

Readings: Randolph, P. (2016). The Psychology of Conflict: Mediating in a Diverse World. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Chapters 4, 5, 6.

Week 4: The Psychology of Conflict in Legal Dispute Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Assumptions and Biases, Amicable Dispute Resolution, Differing Models of Negotiations and Mediations, Empathy, and Neurology of Conflict Resolution.

Readings: Randolph, P. (2016). The Psychology of Conflict: Mediating in a Diverse World. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Chapters 7, 8, 9.

Week 5: Overcoming Cross-Cultural Barriers in Legal Dispute Resolution: Language Differences

Readings: Lewis, R. (2018). When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures. Boston, MA: Hachette Book Group, Chapter 1.

Week 6: Overcoming Cross-Cultural Barriers in Legal Dispute Resolution: Cultural Conditioning

Readings: Lewis, R. (2018). When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures. Boston, MA: Hachette Book Group, Chapter 2.

Week 7, October 10: Overcoming Cross-Cultural Barriers in Legal Dispute Resolution: Culture Categorization, Culture Relativism v. Constructivism, and Integration

Readings: Lewis, R. (2018). When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures. Boston, MA: Hachette Book Group, Chapter 3.

In-Class Activity Links: Video: Richard Evanoff. (2016). How can People from Different Cultures get Along with Each Other? TedX on Youtube.com. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osZr7DLxs8A

Week 8: Overcoming Cross-Cultural Barriers in Legal Dispute Resolution: Time in Cross-Cultural Negotiations

Readings: Lewis, R. (2018). When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures. Boston, MA: Hachette Book Group, Chapter 4.

Week 9: Overcoming Cross-Cultural Barriers in Legal Dispute Resolution: Power- less Communication, Power of Paraphrasing and Reframing, and Communication Gaps

Readings: Lewis, R. (2018). When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures. Boston, MA: Hachette Book Group, Chapter 5.

Week 10: Overcoming Cross-Cultural Barriers in Legal Dispute Resolution: Motivation and Trust-Building, and the Low-Trust Syndrome

Readings: Lewis, R. (2018). When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures. Boston, MA: Hachette Book Group, Chapter 9.

Week 11: Overcoming Cross-Cultural Barriers in Legal Dispute Resolution: Meeting of the Minds, Relationship-Building, Giving-In as a Strategy to Overcome Low Trust and Ot- her Cross-Cultural Barriers

Readings: Lewis, R. (2018). When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures. Boston, MA: Hachette Book Group, Chapter 10.

In-Class Activity Links: Link: Rathi, A. (2015). This Simple Negotiation Tactic Brought 195 Countries to Consensus. Retrieved from https://qz.com/572623/this-simple-negotiation-tactic- brought-195-countries-to-consensus-in-the-paris-climate-talks/.

Week 12: Gender, Race, National Origin, and Religion in Dispute Resolution

Preparation for class:  Please research on recent studies regarding the influence of race, gender, and religion in dispute resolution processes.  Please be prepared to share your findings in class.

Readings: Pair, Lara M. (2002). Cross-Cultural Arbitration: Do the Differences between Cultures Still Influence International Commercial Arbitration Despite Harmonization? ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law. Vol 9, Issue 1, Article 2. Cairns, D. (2005).

Week 13: Cross-Cultural Views of Commercial Dispute Resolution
Readings: Mediating International Commercial Disputes: Differences in U.S. and European Approaches. Dispute Resolution Journal. Aug-Oct 2005; 60, 3.

Cross-Cultural Arbitration: Do the Differences between Cultures Still Influence International Commercial Arbitration Despite Harmonization? ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law. Vol 9, Issue 1, Article 2. Cairns, D. (2005).

Week 14: Giving, transparency, and building trust in Cross-cultural dispute resolution processes.

In-class activity: Final project presentation and discussion.

If you have any questions or comments about the courses, then please feel free to email me at tokarz@wustl.edu.

Karen Tokarz is the Charles Nagel Professor of Public Interest Law & Policy, Director of the Negotiation & Dispute Resolution Programs, and Director of the Civil Rights & Mediation Clinic at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.

September 19, 2022 by
Megan Bess

Transitions, Professional Identity Formation, and the Significance of Summer after 1L Year

By: Megan Bess, Director of the Externship Program and Assistant Professor of Law,
University of Illinois Chicago School of Law

Law students experience significant transitions during their legal education that influence their ability to think and act as an attorney. These transitions are marked by intense learning periods in which students develop a new understanding of their profession. So why are transitions important to professional identity formation? Research from other professions, most notably the medical field, shows us that transitions are key to professional identity development and are therefore important milestones for targeting professional identity formation efforts. These transitions represent opportunities for law schools to support students and further their efforts to comply with the new ABA requirement to integrate professional identity formation into legal education.

While there is generally a dearth of studies regarding the major transitions that students experience on their path to becoming attorneys, Professor Neil Hamilton’s research provides some helpful insight into important transitions during 1L year. Hamilton surveyed students at his own law school and found that summer employment (paid or unpaid) after the first year of law school had the biggest impact on their thinking and acting like a lawyer. Thus, summer employment, particularly after the first year of law school, represents an important transition for law students. This is not entirely surprising, as studies of other professions tell us that reactions to real-world settings often represent critical turning points in developing professional identity.

The challenge is for law schools to leverage tools for professional identity formation to help students understand and capitalize on these important real-world legal experiences. As law schools plan for compliance with ABA Standard 303’s new provision requiring “substantial opportunities” for development of professional identity, they would be wise to consider the importance of major transitions to this process. As Professor Louis Bilionis makes clear, experiences important to professional identity, such as summer employment, take place while a student is in law school but fall outside traditional law school oversight. To fully support professional identity formation during summer employment, legal educators must take a broader view of their responsibilities for all formative experiences during law school.

The good news is that legal education is already equipped with pedagogical tools to support student professional identity during transitions that take place while they are working. Externship pedagogy is designed to support the professional identity formation that takes place during real lawyering work. Common externship tools, such as orientation/training, goal setting, reflection, and feedback, aid in the formation of professional identity. Externship programs differ in structure and can be adapted to the needs of individual schools and curricula. Under ABA Standard 304, every externship program must provide students with opportunities to perform legal work, engage in self-evaluation, receive feedback, and be guided in reflection on the experience. This means that no matter the structure of a school’s externship program, many recommended practices for professional identity formation are already in place.

Schools can leverage their existing externship programs to provide professional identity formation opportunities for all students during the significant transition that occurs while working during the summer after 1L year. Each law school can customize a summer support program with a structure and pedagogy to meet their school’s needs. Ideally, these programs would feature some common effective pedagogical tools. For example, providing an orientation or training program before students begin their summer positions could help frame their experiences and facilitate goal setting that takes into account their own strengths and weaknesses. Reflection is critical for professional identity formation—ideally students would have opportunities to reflect periodically on their experiences and then summarily at summer’s conclusion. Students also need feedback and would greatly benefit from school support in interpreting that feedback while engaging in self-reflection on their performance.

Some notable challenges to this approach include whether to offer academic credit, incentivizing student participation, enlisting faculty and staff support, and engaging employers. In a forthcoming article for the Clinical Law Review, I explore these challenges and offer additional suggestions for such a program following 1L year. In this piece, I propose creating a credit-earning course offered during the summer after 1L year to incentivize participation and underscore the seriousness of the professional identity formation process. There are, however, alternatives to this approach and any efforts that schools can take to support students during important transitions such as the summer after 1L year can reap important benefits.

Please contact me at mbess@uic.edu with comments or questions.

Megan Bess is the Director of the Externship Program and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.

 

 

 

 

September 16, 2022 by
Patrick Longan

Inside the Legal Profession: Conversations with Members of Georgia Bench and Bar

Learning by Example: Conversations with Leaders in the Legal Profession that Help Guide Law Students’ Professional Identity Formation

By: Pat Longan, William Augustus Bootle Chair in Professionalism Ethics, Director of the Mercer Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism, Mercer University School of Law

[Note: This post is adapted from the Foreword to “Inside the Legal Profession – Conversations with Leaders of the Georgia Bench and Bar,” publication forthcoming from Mercer University Press]

All first-year students at Mercer University School of Law take a three-credit course on professional identity. I created the early versions of that course, which began in 2004, and for many years I have taught it with my colleagues Daisy and Tim Floyd. In our course, the students learn that to find success and meaning in the law they need to cultivate a certain kind of professional identity, one that is infused with the traditional values of the profession. The course teaches that lawyers must be competent, faithful to clients, faithful to the law, public-spirited, and civil. It also teaches that lawyers must have the practical wisdom to find the right combination of these virtues for particular situations. To see what we do in that course in detail, take a look at the text we co-wrote, The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer (Routledge Press 2019) and the web page we maintain about it.

Knowing that these are the virtues that lawyers need is important but not enough. Cultivating them is hard work, and there are many obstacles to their implementation in practice. We discovered early in the evolution of the course that we needed to focus not just on the transmission of knowledge but also on motivating the students. We had to show the students the rewards of all that hard work and perseverance. To do that, we needed to bring to them lawyers and judges who are exemplars of the kinds of professionals we are urging them to become.

That need led to the creation of the “Inside the Legal Profession” component of our course. On Monday and Friday mornings over the course of the semester, I interview judges and lawyers with the entire first year class as the audience. I follow the format of the famous “Inside the Actor’s Studio” interviews that James Lipton conducted for many years, and I discuss with each guest his or her life in the law, leaving time at the end for the students to ask questions. The interviews are routinely recorded. More than fifty of the interviews are posted to YouTube, where collectively they have garnered thousands of views. You can find a link to those interviews here. Mercer Law received the 2014 E. Smythe Gambrell Professionalism Award for this project.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of interviewing justices and judges from the federal trial and appellate courts; the Georgia Supreme Court; the Georgia Court of Appeals; various Superior Courts around the state; State Court judges; a Juvenile Court judge; and a Magistrate Court judge. Lawyers from every part of the profession have participated: prosecutors; defense lawyers; big firm, big city litigators and transactional specialists; solo practitioners; divorce and family law attorneys; government lawyers; law professors and administrators; in-house counsel; plaintiffs’ lawyers; insurance defense lawyers; and bar counsel. Our students have heard from members of the profession at every stage of a career, including brand-new graduates who talk about those first months of practice, to young lawyers navigating the partnership track in law firms or struggling to make successes of their own firms, all the way to senior partners and distinguished judges with the perspectives of decades in the profession. The roster of guests has been diverse by gender, race, sexual preference, and ethnicity. At Mercer, we have been honored by the generosity of all the busy and important people who have volunteered their time to help introduce our new students to the many lives in the law from which the students might choose.

This fall, Mercer University Press is publishing the transcripts of eleven of these interviews. It was difficult to choose just a handful of the interviews to include in the book, but the lawyers and judges who appear represent an excellent cross-section of our guests. Five are graduates of Mercer Law School. United States District Judge Louis Sands describes his journey from the time when he was a child and told his mother that he wanted to attend Mercer University – this at a time when no African-American child could do so – through his Mercer education, service as a prosecutor, private practitioner, and Superior Court Judge, to his nomination, confirmation, and service on the federal bench. Angie Coggins talks about what it is like to serve as a public defender, the career choice she made as an intern in Mercer Law School and that she followed for more than thirty years. Tomieka Daniel, who has participated in the series every year since its inception, gives the students a look inside the challenges and rewards of representing clients who need but cannot afford a lawyer for a civil matter and thus turn to her as a legal services attorney. Doc Schneider tells of his serendipitous choice to attend Mercer Law School and how that led to a stellar career at King & Spalding in Atlanta, including working for two other famous Mercer lawyers, former judge and attorney general Griffin Bell and legendary trial lawyer Frank Jones. Lamar Sizemore, Jr., who along with Judge Sands is a member of the famous Mercer Law class of 1974, talks about his three careers, as a highly successful plaintiffs’ lawyer, as a Superior Court judge, and as a mediator. Along the way, he imparts memorable lessons, including what he learned from the late, great Hank O’Neill about how one deals with opposing counsel who mistreat you.

Others who appear in the book have connections to the Mercer Law faculty. Professor Jim Fleissner has taught at Mercer since 1994, and the graduating classes have selected him to receive the teaching award seventeen times; he talks about his earlier career as a federal prosecutor and about how to take advantage of the opportunities that law school affords. Dean Daisy Floyd, now University Professor of Law and Ethical Formation, describes her career trajectory from being an associate at a big law firm through her appointment and service as Dean of the Mercer Law School. Along the way, she had occasion to be a client, and in her interview, she candidly describes the circumstances that led her to need a lawyer and the lessons she learned about lawyering from the experience of being a client. Justice (then Judge) Verda Colvin is an adjunct professor at Mercer; she shares the insight and wisdom of someone who has succeeded in private practice, as a state prosecutor, as a federal prosecutor, and as a judge. Her dedication to excellence, and her courage to be herself as a judge rather than mimic what other judges do, have inspired our students every time she has visited our class.

Two of the interviews in this volume are of lawyers who have no direct connection to Mercer but who nevertheless made the effort to come to Macon and speak with our students. Emmet Bondurant talks about his varied and highly successful career, as a Supreme Court advocate, founder and leader of a highly successful commercial firm in Atlanta, as an attorney for two detainees at Guantanamo Naval Base, and as the pro bono lawyer for a man wrongfully convicted of murder. He describes his motivation for some of his most high-profile pro bono work: “I hate bullies.” Former Chief Justice Harold Melton (now a partner at Troutman Pepper in Atlanta) shared with the class his experiences as the first African-American president of the student body at Auburn University; as a law student at the University of Georgia who placed at “the  top of the bottom half of the class;” as a lawyer in the Georgia Attorney General’s office; as counsel to Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue; as a Justice on the Supreme Court of Georgia; and finally as Chief Justice of that Court. He speaks of the importance in his life of the mentorship of a previous Chief Justice, the late Harris Hines.

As part of their development of their professional identities, students need to see and hear from lawyers and judges who have succeeded and found success and meaning in their work. They need to have exemplars, people whose stories inspire them and whose paths they may want to follow. With the help of the people whose interviews appear in the forthcoming book, and the help of the dozens of others who have participated in the “Inside the Legal Profession” project, we have been able to do that at Mercer Law School. If you are interested in doing something similar as part of a professional identity program, or you want to create a professional identity class, then please contact me at longan_p@law.mercer.edu.

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

September 12, 2022 by