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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 hami3258

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 hami3258

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 hami3258

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 hami3258

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 hami3258

Kathryn Thompson

Normalizing Checking in with One Another and with Ourselves

By: Kathryn M. Thompson, Director of Academic Excellence and Teaching Professor,
Roger Williams University School of Law

Interpretation 303-5 states that “[t]he development of a professional identity should involve an intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.” Any of us who have struggled with our mental health understand that our first instinct is to isolate ourselves when the pangs of anxiety or the darkness of depression rear their heads. While society has come a long way since I first faced my own mental health challenges over twenty years ago, stigma and some shame still attach to these challenges, particularly in legal institutions where traditionally these challenges have been considered weaknesses.

Each year law school staff and faculty have an opportunity to choose what messages to prioritize in our early sessions with our incoming 1L students. I wrote this blog as I prepared for Orientation with our first-year students. We greet our 1Ls each year in mid-August. Their fresh faces, revealing equal amounts of excitement and anxiety, remind me of the vital role law schools play in our students’ well-being. So many opportunities exist at this early moment to fan their excitement and curiosity and to alleviate their anxieties as they enter their first year of law school. Accomplishing this task while also being candid about the demands of law school and its potential impact on their mental health is an important goal for law school faculty and staff each year. Every year I try to balance teaching skills like case briefing and reading with the less obvious but equally necessary concepts of growth mindset and self-care. Law students need both types of information and while I know how to teach someone how to read a case and I have a decent presentation on growth mindset, I have struggled helping my students embrace self-care in law school. I am like most lawyers who never learned about wellness in law school and was forced to do so after I suffered a depressive episode in my mid-30s. It was only then that I worked with a therapist who helped me to understand the importance of “checking in” with myself regularly regarding my own mental health and only then did I become more able to embrace wellness practices. I am still working on embracing them.

Several forces at play in the first year of law school inhibit a student’s willingness and ability to reach out for help. First, the sheer novelty of the legal casebook method of learning and the Socratic method (however modified it may be) creates a challenge to prepare for classes. Add the legalese in many casebooks and the need to learn a whole new foundational vocabulary and students are hard-pressed to manage their time particularly come October when legal writing papers and midterms first hit. The sheer pace of law school can prevent them from being aware of the impact their sleep deprivation or anxiety is having on their studies. And the shame associated with being “the only one” who isn’t thriving does not encourage wellness practices. Again, without awareness of our own mental health status and an intentional reflection on our mental health, students – and lawyers – continue riding the roller-coaster without seeking help in the early stages before crisis hits. Added to the workload is a law student’s concern (and misconception) that seeking counseling for their mental health challenges will lead to character and fitness issues when they seek to practice law. In this environment, helping students to embrace wellness practices requires an intentional effort to message to all students that the law school community values self-care and that wellness is a key component of a balanced life as a lawyer.

While the counseling center in a university (if a school is fortunate to have one), provides the expert counseling, efforts by law school staff and faculty in alliance with the student body can provide the fertile ground in which students embrace wellbeing practices such as meditation, exercise, deep breathing, therapy, and medication. There are steps that law schools can take early on in a students’ career to provide students “permission” and opportunity to incorporate wellness practices into their studies and, thus, their future legal practice. At RWU law over the past two or so years we have instituted some steps to foster our students’ awareness of their own mental health and to normalize pausing and reflecting on one’s own mental health at regular interviews throughout the course of the semester. One of these measures is called Early Alert: Proactive Check-Ins to Prevent Suicide/Violence and Promote Wellness. Through the initiative of Lorraine Lalli, Dean of Student Life and Operations, the law school partnered with Early Alert last year. Early Alert provides regular, confidential opportunities for students to pause and reflect on their wellness in various areas such as Sleep, Academics, Finances, Relationships, etc. Students who opt into the program report on their wellness on a scale of one to ten. A student who reports a score that shows the student is struggling in that area receives resources and a check-in over the next few days. Another measure the school has taken, which is more subtle but equally important is that we have intentionally prioritized wellness with our students early in the semester. During the first week of school, we bring all of our 1Ls together for a session on wellness. During this session we introduce our students to the Director of our Counseling Center who provides an overview of the counseling center’s services and also a brief explanation of the various reasons that students may seek counseling. 2L and 3L students attended that session this year to provide the message that the 1Ls have a network of support within the law school.

This year, Anna Arakelian, the President and founder of the RWU Law Mental Health Club spoke of an upcoming session the club had scheduled in September on Imposter Syndrome with Remmy Stourac, the author of “The Arsenal of Gratitude.” “Whatever you’re feeling, we felt it, too,” Anna told the 1Ls who listened intently to her and to the two Academic Excellence Teaching Fellows, 3L Nellie Large, and 2L Stefanie Fischer who came to connect with the 1Ls that day. All three upper-level students encouraged the 1Ls to use Early Alert and to be honest about how they were feeling. If the alert asked them to rate their sleep on a zero to ten scale and they had a zero, put zero. “At first I would usually put the higher number because I didn’t want to say that I wasn’t doing well, but one day I was honest and the Alert provided me with helpful resources,” Anna told the students. All upper-level students spoke of finding time (whether thirty minutes or a whole day) to take breaks from law school and how important those breaks are to their ability to thrive in law school. Each wished they had paused more often during the 1L year to provide time for maintaining some balance in their lives.

Forging human connections with our students provides opportunity for authenticity and vulnerability. If students feel free to voice their anxieties and their self-doubts, whether with another student, a staff member, or faculty member, students are much more likely to implement wellness practices as a meaningful part of their lives as students and future lawyers. As Anna said to me after the session, “We’re all humans before we become lawyers.”

Please contact me at kthompson@rwu.edu with comments or questions.

Kathryn M. Thompson serves as the Director of Academic Excellence and Teaching Professor at Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island.

September 14, 2022 by hami3258

Janet Stearns

Postcard from Miami

By Janet Stearns, Dean of Students, University of Miami School of Law
August 24, 2022

We have just concluded our orientation week at the University of Miami School of Law. I thought that I would share some lessons learned from this year’s program as we all work to set the right tone on well-being and mindfulness.

This year, day 2 of orientation included rotating programs for all of our incoming JD students:
–Mindfulness & Well-Being
–Academic Integrity & Professional Identity
–Inclusion, Belonging & Professional Identity
–Panels of upper-level students sharing advice and insights with the 1L’s.

While we included some aspects of all of these themes in past years, the focus on ABA Standard 303 guided us to sharpen our message in some important ways.

The Mindfulness & Well-Being program was the culmination of a powerful collaboration throughout this summer between my colleagues Jack Townsend, a Miami Law graduate who joined our team one year ago as an Assistant Director of Student Life, Scott Rogers, Director of our Mindfulness in Law Program, and Marcia Narine Weldon, Director of our Transactional Skills Program, and a consultant on legal coaching particularly in the area of growth mindset and lawyer well-being.

We framed our presentation to address and respond to three concerns common to many 1Ls.

First, the feeling of overwhelm.

During this section, I spoke of the importance of managing time to balance school obligations and goals with self-care and other personal priorities. Drawing on the work of Steven Covey, in his book First Things First, I used a jar to demonstrate the importance of identifying our life’s big priorities (i.e., the “big rocks”) and find strategies for ensuring that all of the big rocks can fit into the jar. One goal is to identify the big goals during these next three years of law school. Another is to manage time so that we don’t waste it all on “little rocks” so that we can’t get to our “big rocks.” As you can see the jar also includes a tea bag (because we can never be too busy for a cup of tea with a friend.) All members of the panel reflected on our own valuable self-care practices and how we managed time to support these practices as well as our other life goals.

Next, concerns about fear.

To this, Marcia drew on a range of practices to manage fear, from breathing exercises, movement exercises, and tapping. She reflected on her own recent travels (to Machu Picchu) and her consulting with law firms and major corporations around professional coaching. She spoke also about the power of growth mindset to tame fears, enhance our brains and emotions, and develop confidence. All members of the panel reflected on tools that we used to address fears in law school and beyond.

Third, self-doubt in law school, including imposter syndrome. This provided the foundation for Scott to discuss and demonstrate the power of mindfulness practices in law school. Scott shares a powerful image from his book Mindfulness for Law Students that depicts the “Roller Coaster of E-Motion.” Scott spoke to the ways that mindfulness can train our mind to have awareness of the patterns that sabotage our “freeway of flow” where we can best focus on law school and our other pursuits. This section then led into a mindfulness exercise for all.

In between each of these three sections, Jack invited each student to reflect and write on a designed card; students had five minutes to journal. The goals were both to provide opportunity for self-reflection and also to document each student’s emotions and insights from the session. At the conclusion of the program, each student was asked to put the card in a sealed envelope with his/her/their name on the cover.

Our intention is to return the cards to the students in November near the end of the semester and before finals. We hope that this will provide a reminder of their own thoughts on tackling overwhelm, fear, and self-doubt as they gear up for the end of the semester “push.”

Measuring the efficacy of our interventions is a challenge for me, and one that I am striving to address in the upcoming year. Anecdotally, I will note that I attended a reception for one of our affinity groups four days after this program. Several students came up to me to tell me that they had been pondering their “big rocks.” Students have also approached me to obtain information on where I am practicing yoga (one of the self-care activities I spoke about) and how they could join. Each and every one of these encounters suggests positive steps as we build our community of well-being and model our own approaches to integrating wellness with our professional identities.

I welcome comments and opportunities to learn from others as to how you are addressing these important topics in Orientation 2022.

You may contact me at jstearns@law.miami.edu.

August 24, 2022 by hami3258

Dawn Figueiras

One Law School’s Faculty-Approved Implementation Plan for Complying with the ABA’s Revised Standards 303(b) and 303(c)

The American Bar Association (ABA) requires that all law schools develop a plan in the fall of 2022 regarding how schools will implement in the fall of 2023 the revised ABA standards 303(b) and 303(c) that cover professional identity formation and bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism. Appalachian School of Law (ASL) tasked its Curriculum Committee to draft a proposed plan for compliance with the revised standards. The Committee, chaired by Professor Dawn Figueiras, included the Honorable Larry G. Elder, Professor Jeremy Hurley, Associate Dean of Students Shelly James, Dean of Experiential Learning Lucy McGee, Professor Ken Russell, Chief Academic Officer Laura Wilson, and President & Dean Keith Faulkner. The committee spent the summer discussing what ASL already does in these spaces and how ASL would utilize those efforts, along with new ones, to create a proposed plan for the faculty to review. Professor Figueiras participated in webinars sponsored by AALS, SUNY-University at Buffalo School of Law, and others, and gratefully utilized the resources links compiled and hosted on the Buffalo School of Law website. On August 8-9, 2022, at ASL’s Faculty Retreat, the Committee presented its plan to the faculty and engaged in productive discussions to revise the plan. Although the ABA did not set a date for completion of the plan, the full Faculty unanimously adopted the Implementation Plan below on August 16, 2022.

The following is the IMPLEMENTATION PLAN FOR REVISED ABA STANDARD 303’s REQUIREMENTS approved by the ASL faculty.

ADOPTED ASL Implementation Plan for Revised Standard 303 2022-08-16 (003)

A. Revised 303(b)(3)—“provide substantial opportunities to students for . . . the development of a professional identity.”

Orientation: Administration of the “Professionalism Oath” by a Virginia Supreme Court Justice or Court of Appeals Judge. The Professionalism Oath is modeled after the oath given to new members of the Virginia State Bar about their professional duties and responsibilities; students take the Oath after being sworn and sign the Oath as well.
Students take the Professionalism Oath at ASL
During Orientation/early during 1L year: Organize a visit to a Court, preferably a federal court; give students opportunities for reflection on their experience.
Fall Semester, 1L year: Revise “Introduction to Community Service” course to incorporate at least three lectures/sessions about concepts of professionalism and professional identity formation. Rename course: “Building a Professional Identity.
a. Possible examples of topics may include: What kind of lawyer do I want to be? What character/personality strengths do I possess and what does that mean for my career choices? How do I conduct myself in a professional manner? How do I incorporate community service and pro bono service into my career?
Spring Semester, 1L year: Lecture series for 1Ls (3 events) involving professionalism and/or professional identity formation. This would be incorporated as part of the Dean’s new “Professionalism, Leadership, and Transition to Practice” (“PLT”) program.
Summer after 1L year: Students participate in an Externship placement and keep a journal documenting their experiences and self-reflections.
2L year: The PLT program will incorporate four formal sessions on leadership; at least one session will discuss and encourage leadership within the legal profession.
Annually: Professionalism Dinner event (part of PLT program). Select a bar leader to receive a Professionalism Award from ASL. Invite attorneys and judges to attend, with professors, to engage in discussion with students regarding professionalism/ethical issues.

B. New 303(c)—“provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism … at the start of the program … and at least once again before graduation.” “For students engaged in law clinics or field placements, the second educational occasion will take place before, concurrently with, or as part of their enrollment in clinical or field placement courses.”

Orientation: Lecture/session by ASL Diversity Mentor Virginia Supreme Court Justice Cleo Powell. (Fulfills the requirement for one educational experience at the start of the J.D. program)
Spring Semester, 1L year: Incorporate into the required “Introduction to Externships” course at least one mandatory session on bias, cross-cultural competency, and/or racism. (Fulfills the requirement for a second educational experience prior to/concurrently with externships and other field placements.)
Spring Semester, 2L year: Incorporate into the required “Professional Responsibility” course at least one mandatory session on bias, cross-cultural competency, and/or racism.
3L year: The Professionalism, Leadership, and Transition to Practice (“PLT”) program will include six sessions on Transition to Practice; at least one session will incorporate discussion of issues involving bias/cross-cultural competency/racism that arise in legal practice.
Curriculum-wide: Encourage all faculty to incorporate discussions of racism/cross-cultural competency/bias into their courses, wherever the regular course of study offers such an opportunity. The subject matter should be documented in the Course Description and in the Course’s Syllabus by the professor.
Elective Courses: Offer electives with a significant component addressing bias, cross-cultural competency, and/or racism. Elective courses will outline in their Course Descriptions/Syllabi how bias, cross-cultural competency, and/or racism are addressed in the course. Currently, ASL offers “History of Race and the Law” (co-taught by the Hon. Larry Elder and adjunct Professor and ASL Diversity Mentor Chris Young) as a general elective in both Fall and Spring semesters, and “Poverty, Health, and the Law” (taught by Dean of Experiential Learning
Professor Chris Young

Lucy McGee as a general elective in Fall and Spring semesters as well as summer sessions. This course is a pre-requisite for student participation in ASL’s Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic. The Clinic is a joint project of Ballad Health Systems, ASL, and Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business.

Should you have any questions or if you would like to discuss the plan, then please contact Professor Dawn Figueiras at dfigueiras@asl.edu.

Guest Contributor Professor Dawn Figueiras

August 22, 2022 by hami3258

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