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Professional Identity Formation As Theory and As Practice for the Education of a Lawyer

A new article by Holloran Center Fellow Lou Bilionis and Co-Director Neil Hamilton, Professional Identity Formation As Theory and As Practice for the Education of a Lawyer, takes a deep dive Professional Identity Formation As Theory and As Practice for the Education of a Lawyer, takes a deep dive into the theory and practice of professional identity formation (PIF) in J.D. legal education. Building on nearly two decades of scholarship since Educating Lawyers, the piece argues that professional values are the driving force behind true excellence in developing legal skills. The paper examines why law schools have historically fallen short in cultivating the full range of values and skills new graduates need, and it also highlights the recent shifts prompting meaningful reform. Importantly, the article also offers practical guidance for faculty and staff on how to foster each student’s PIF, which is positioned to serve as the driving force behind the future of legal education.

Here is a link to the article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5387750

And here is the abstract:

The past eighteen years of exploration and development regarding professional identity formation since the publication of Educating Lawyers make clear that professional identity formation is first and foremost a theory of J.D. legal education. Indeed, it may very well be the only theory of J.D. legal education standing today. Essentially, the premise of professional identity formation is that professional values are the foundation for and drive excellence at the development of professional skills. Each student should explore and understand what are the values of the profession and the skills needed to practice law, and develop the skills toward excellence.

This article explores professional identity formation as a theory of J.D. legal education and as a movement to reform J.D. legal education. The article analyzes why law schools historically have underinvested in the student development of the full range of professional values and skills a new graduate needs, and then why conditions have changed, leading some law schools to move toward an effective professional identity formation curriculum. The article provides guidance on how to engage the faculty and staff to support each student’s professional identity formation.

August 29, 2025 by hami3258

Patrick Longan

Mercer Law Review Symposium on Professional Identity and the Multiple Roles of the Lawyer

by Professor Patrick Longan, William Augustus Bootle Chair in Professionalism and Ethics at Mercer University School of Law

In October, 2024, the Mercer Law Review held a symposium entitled, “Parts of a Whole: The Multiple Roles of a Lawyer and Professional Identity.” As the readers of this blog know, the accreditation standards for law schools were amended in 2022 to require every school to provide students with substantial opportunities for the development of a professional identity. The guidance for that new standard contains this statement: “The development of professional identity should involve an intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.”

At Mercer, we have devoted much time and effort to identifying the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices that are universal for all lawyers – the ones that are non-negotiable.[1] With this symposium, we sought to take the next steps, to explore how those values play out in different roles that lawyers play, to determine whether there are additional aspects of professional identity that are required in those roles, and to consider whether those lessons should lead us to revise our thinking about what is non-negotiable for all lawyers.

For example, Professor Mark Brown and I contributed an essay on professional identity and “cause lawyering.” After identifying Mercer’s list of required values and guiding principles for all lawyers (competence, fidelity to the client, fidelity to the law, public spiritedness, civility, and practical wisdom), we write about the special challenges that cause lawyers face in living up to those expectations. For example, a cause lawyer might be tempted to sacrifice fidelity to a client in the name of the cause. Or they might treat opposing counsel with a lack of civility because those lawyers oppose the cause. Professor Brown and I then identify one aspect of professional identity that was not on the original list of universal values and guiding principles but that is necessary in this role – the cause lawyer accepts personal moral responsibility for the consequences of their professional actions.

Professor Brown and I then make the argument that acceptance of such responsibility should be an aspect of every lawyer’s professional identity. It, like competence, fidelity to the client, etc., should be non-negotiable. We disclaim any interest in teaching students what their moral values should be, but we contend that, as a well-being practice, it is important to align your values with your work. This is not a new argument, and it has been presented persuasively in recent works by Judge William Duffey[2] and Professor Katya Cronin.[3] But we thought the point emerged clearly from the discussion of cause lawyers and that, viewed as a well-being practice, it fit well with the ABA guidance on what law schools should be teaching about professional identity.

You may find the other articles from the symposium instructive:

Fundamental Dimensions of Law and Legal Education: Developing a Model of a Modern Legal System and Its Application to the Transnational Dimensions of Law
by Mark L. Jones
Current Events in Legal Classrooms: Enhancing Professional Identity Formation
by Stevie Leahy
Expressing Sincere Gratitude in Writing: A Modest Step Towards Being a Better and More Effective Lawyer
by Bret Rappaport
Professional Identity in Context: The Transactional Business Lawyer as Counselor and Leader
by Joan MacLeod Heminway
Professional Roles Expanded: Holistic, Systemic, & Optimistic Lawyering
by Douglas B. Ammar
The Lawyer’s Obligation as Public Citizen
by Gene R. Nichol
The Pressure Points of Professional Identity for Judges in the Modern Era
by Charles Gardner Geyh

These articles, along with transcripts of the symposium’s sessions and Mary Smith’s keynote address, are available at https://digitalcommons.law.mercer.edu/jour_mlr/vol76/iss3/.

[1] See Patrick Longan, Daisy Floyd, and Timothy Floyd, The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer (2023).

[2] William S. Duffey, Jr., The Significant Lawyer (2021).

[3] Katya S. Cronin, Value-Centered Lawyering: Refocusing the Law School Curriculum to Promote Well-Being, Quality Client Representation, and a Thriving Legal Field, 101 U. Det. L. Rev. 257 (2024).

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

July 8, 2025 by hami3258

Jerome Organ

Law School Transfer Data and Professional Identity Formation

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

This blog posting updates my blog postings over the last several years regarding what we know about the transfer market, for example 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020. With the ABA’s posting of the 2024 Standard 509 Reports, we now have more than a decade of detailed transfer data from which to glean insights about the transfer market among law schools, which has been in decline for most of the last decade. This posting also includes a section on transfer “feeder schools” and some reflections on whether and how law schools might be providing opportunities for professional identity formation for their transfer students.

Numbers of Transfers and Percentage of Transfers Remain Essentially Flat at the Lowest Levels in the Last Decade

As shown in Table 1 below, the number of transfer students received by law schools in 2024 increased slightly from 1162 to 1194, the second smallest number of transfers in the last decade, but as a percentage of first-year students, it remained flat at 3.0%. For the last several years, the transfer market had been shrinking, having declined from 5.5% in 2014, to 4.7% in 2016, to 3.4% in 2019, and then to 3.0% in 2022, where it has remained in 2023 and 2024. Aside from a slight bump in 2017, and another bump in 2020, there has been a continuous gradual decline in transfers over the last several years – from nearly 2200 to less than 1200 and from 5.5% of first-years in the previous fall to 3.0% (both down over 45%).

TABLE 1 – Number of Transfers and Percentage of Transfers from 2014-2024

After an increase in transfers in 2020, we saw declines in 2021 (to 1375 and 3.6%), 2022 (to 1231 and 3.0%), and 2023 (to 1162 and 3.0%) – the lowest number and percentage in a decade. While the number of transfers increased slightly in 2024, because there was a corresponding increase in the number of first-years, the percentage remained flat at 3.0%.

As I noted in my previous blogs, I believe the consistent decline in transfers is directly related to the increase in scholarship assistance over the last decade, including the elimination of conditional scholarships at dozens of law schools, which has made the financial calculus associated with transferring much less attractive. (The ABA defines a “conditional scholarship” as any scholarship “the retention of which is dependent upon the student maintaining a minimum grade point average or class standing” other than good standing. The number of law schools with conditional scholarship dropped from roughly 140 in 2011 to fewer than 70 as of 2023.) If a student were going to be paying full tuition at a given law school either because they did not receive a scholarship or lost a conditional scholarship and could transfer to a much higher ranked law school in the region for only marginal additional cost (and perhaps without having to move), transferring might make sense. But if a student has to forego scholarship assistance and absorb significantly more financial cost to transfer, then staying at the student’s initial law school makes more sense.

In addition, with the dramatic improvement in employment outcomes across law schools generally, with 81% of May 2024 graduates landing full-time, long-term bar passage required positions, the likelihood of having significantly better employment prospects at a school to which one might transfer also seems less compelling.

SOME LAW SCHOOLS CONTINUE TO DOMINATE THE TRANSFER MARKET

Table 2 below lists the top 15 law schools participating in the transfer market in descending order in Summer 2021 (fall 2020 entering class), Summer 2022 (fall 2021 entering class), Summer 2023 (fall 2022 entering class), and Summer 2024.

(Note that in Table 2, Table 4, and Table 5 the “repeat players” are bolded – those schools in the top 15 for all four years are in black, those schools in the top 15 for three of the four years are in blue.) Seven of the top 15 for 2024 have been on the list for taking in the largest number of transfers all four years: Columbia, Florida, George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard, and Northwestern. Four others have been on the list for three of the four years: Arizona State, NYU, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. Table 2 also shows that for 2024, the concentration of transfers in the top 15 law schools for transfers remained near 50%, down just slightly from 2023.

TABLE 2 – Largest Law Schools by Number of Transfers from 2021-2024

As shown in Table 3 below, if we focus just on the top ten law schools for transfers in, the total number of transfers is 481 – 40% of all transfers – the second highest percentage in the last decade.

TABLE 3 – Totals for Top Ten Law Schools for Transfers In as a Percentage of All Transfers for 2014-2024

In terms of law schools with the highest percentage of transfers in as a percentage of their previous year’s first-year class, as shown below in Table 4, nine law schools have been on the list each of the last four years – Florida, Florida State, George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard, Northwestern, UNLV, and Vanderbilt. Three law schools have been on the list three times in the last four years – Chicago, Florida Int’l, and NYU. Four schools have been on the list in two of the last four years – Arizona State, Columbia, Houston and UCLA. The number of law schools welcoming transfers representing 20% or more of their first-year class has fallen from nine in 2013 (not shown), to none in 2019, four in 2020, two in 2021, and only one in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

TABLE 4 – Largest Law Schools by Transfers as a Percentage of Previous First-Year Class – 2021-2024

TRANSFER FEEDER SCHOOLS

There also are some law schools that appear consistently in the list of top feeder schools for transfers as shown below in Table 5. These fifteen schools have been responsible for roughly 25-30% of transfer students in each of the last three years.

TABLE 5 – Largest Law Schools by Transfers Out for 2021-2024

Six law schools have been on the list of top transfer out law schools in each of the last four years – American, Brooklyn Law School, George Washington University, Nova Southeastern, University of California College of the Law – San Francisco, and the University of Miami. There are three additional law schools on the list in three of the last four years: Barry University, University of Maryland, and Touro University.

Notably, one of these schools – George Washington University – shows up on both the transfer out in Table 5 and the transfer in list above in Table 2. They are losing students to higher-ranked law schools and then back-filling with their own transfers from lower-ranked schools.

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MARKETS –

Starting in December 2014, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar began collecting and requiring law schools with 12 or more transfers in to report not only the number of students who have transferred in, but also the law schools from which they came (indicating the number from each law school). In addition, the law schools with 12 or more transfers in had to report the 75%, 50% and 25% first-year law school GPAs of the students who transferred in. This allows one to look at where students are coming from and are going to, as well as the first-year GPA profile of students transferring in to different law schools.

Table 6 below focuses on the seven law schools in Table 2 that have been among the top15 in terms of number of transfers in for each of the last four years, presented in descending U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) rank. Table 6 indicates the extent to which these seven law schools were attracting transfers from the geographic region in which they are located and highlights that the transfer market, to some extent, is a set of regional sub-markets.

TABLE 6 – Percentage of Transfers from Within Geographic Region 2022-2023-2024 and Top Feeder School for 2024 at Each of the Seven Law Schools among the Top 15 for Transfers In for 2022, 2023, and 2024

Five of the seven law schools had at least 44% of their transfers from the region in which they are located. Two of these seven law schools, Northwestern and Florida, obtained 50% or more of their transfers from the geographic region within which the law school is located for the last three years. On the other hand, Harvard is the only law school to have 35% or fewer transfers from its own region all three years, while Georgetown is the only other law school to have less than half of their transfers from its own region all three years.

When one looks at the transfer out schools in Table 5 in comparison with the transfer in schools in Table 2, one can see some of the regional realities. In the state of Florida, Nova Southeastern and Miami, followed by Barry University and to a lesser extent, St. Thomas University and Stetson, are transfer feeder schools for the University of Florida Levin College of Law, and to a lesser extent for Miami, Florida International, and Florida State, who received a number of those transfers. In the Mid-Atlantic, American, George Washington, and to a lesser extent Maryland, Baltimore, and Catholic are transfer feeder schools for Georgetown, with George Washington and George Mason receiving a number of transfers, too. In California, the University of California College of Law San Francisco, and to a lesser extent Loyola Marymount and Southwestern are transfer feeder schools for the University of California Berkeley and University of California Los Angeles. Miami, George Washington, and Loyola Marymount are the unique players in each region as they tend to lose a significant number of transfers and also accept a significant number of transfers.

Table 6 also identifies the law school that provided the largest number of transfers to each listed law school in 2024, as well as the percentage of transfers that came from that school. One of the seven law schools had a significant percentage (more than 20%) of its transfers in from one feeder school – George Washington with 25% of its transfers coming from American (which also was the biggest supplier of transfers to Georgetown and George Mason!). Similarly, Northwestern took 20% of its transfers from Loyola Chicago.

Notably, six of the seven law schools that have been the most consistent players in the transfer market over the last four years are on the East Coast (Columbia, Florida, George Mason Georgetown, George Washington, and Harvard) while one is in the Midwest (Northwestern).

VARIED QUALITY OF THE TRANSFER POOL

Table 7 below shows the tiers of law schools from which these seven largest law schools in the transfer market for each of the last four years received their transfer students. Four of the seven law schools that consistently have high numbers of transfers in are ranked in the top 15 in U.S. News, while the other three are ranked between 31 (George Mason and George Washington) and 38 (Florida).

TABLE 7 – Percentage of Transfers from Different Tiers of School(s) for 2022, 2023, and 2024 at the Seven Law Schools Among the Top 15 for Transfers in 2022, 2023, and 2024

(Bolded data indicates the modal percentage response for each law school.)

Two of the seven law schools – Harvard (no lower than 72%) and Columbia (no lower than 55%) – have consistently had large percentages of their transfers from law schools ranked between 1 and 50 in the U.S. News rankings. By contrast, in 2024, three of these seven law schools had more than 50% of their transfers from law schools ranked 101 or lower (Florida, George Mason, George Washington).

TABLE 8 – First-Year Law School 75th/50th/25thGPA of Transfers in 2022, 2023, and 2024 at the Seven Law Schools among the Top 15 for Transfers in 2022, 2023, and 2024

Table 8 above highlights the reported GPAs of transfers in for these seven law schools. In looking at Table 8, one quickly sees that of the four law schools ranked in the U.S. News top 15, only one – Harvard – has a 50th GPA for transfers in 2023 that is above 3.9, and a 25th GPA of 3.8 and above. Harvard also is accepting most of its transfers from top 50 law schools, making it clear that it is accepting transfers in who could have been admitted to Harvard in the first instance. Columbia is a close second, with all three of its metrics close to 0.1 below those of Harvard.

The other two top 15 law schools – Northwestern and Georgetown – are a step below in terms of the credentials of their transfers, with 50th GPAs of 3.8 and 3.69, respectively, and with 25th GPAs of 3.63 and 3.59, respectively, in 2024. In 2024, 60% or more of Northwestern’s and Georgetown’s transfers were from law schools ranked 51 or lower. For Georgetown and Northwestern, with a majority of their transfers coming from law schools ranked outside the top 50, many of these transfer students may not have had the credentials to be admitted as first-year students at Georgetown or Northwestern.

Once you drop out of the top 15, the other three law schools – Florida (3.51), George Washington (3.36) and George Mason (3.26) – each has a 50th GPA well below that of the other four law schools on the list and 25th GPAs that drop to 3.44, 3.19, and 3.14, respectively. With 80% or more of these transfers coming from law schools ranked 51 or lower, these law schools clearly are welcoming a number of transfer students whose entering credentials almost certainly were sufficiently distinct from each of those law schools’ entering class credentials such that the transfer students they are admitting would not have been admitted as first-year students in the prior year.

STILL MANY UNKNOWNS

As I have noted for the last few years, these more detailed transfer data from the ABA should be very helpful to prospective law students and pre-law advisors, and to current law students who are considering transferring. These data give them a better idea of what transfer opportunities might be available depending upon where they are planning to go to law school (or are presently enrolled as a first-year student).

Even with these more granular data now available, however, there still are a significant number of unknowns relating to transfer students, particularly regarding gender and ethnicity of transfer students and performance of transfer students at their new law school (both academically and in terms of bar passage and employment).

With the increased emphasis on professional identity formation reflected in ABA Standard 303(b)(3) and (c), there may be questions about how law schools are addressing professional identity formation for transfer students, particularly at those law schools that have added a first-year course/program focused on professional development or professional identity formation.

Are these law schools requiring transfers to take these courses with their incoming first-year students? Are there specific professional development or professional identity formation courses structured for transfer students at those law schools with a significant cohort of transfer students (10-15 or more)? Are there better ways to address the professional identity formation of transfer students that would help them integrate into the law school community where they are transferring? These are questions for which additional research would be warranted.

Please feel free to contact me at jmorgan@stthomas.edu should you have any comments or questions.

I am very grateful for the help of research assistant Alena Stankaitis in compiling some of the information for this blog posting and for helpful comments from my colleague, David Grenardo.

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

May 6, 2025 by hami3258

Jerome Organ

Astonishingly Strong Employment Outcomes for the Class of 2024

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

In January 2022, I posted a blog about the 10% increase in first-year enrollment across law schools in fall 2021, suggesting that the addition of roughly 3000-3500 law school graduates in May 2024 might mean employment challenges for some, particularly in states or regions that saw the largest increase in first-year students in fall 2021.

Was I ever wrong! The ABA will be releasing data on employment outcomes for 2024 graduates of all ABA-accredited law schools in the coming days. But I went and gathered the data from all ABA-accredited law schools to see how things turned out for the class of 2024, and the results are stunning! Absolutely, unbelievably stunning!!

Across all ABA-accredited law schools outside of Puerto Rico, the number of graduates between 2023 and 2024 increased by 3,710, from 34,845 to 38,555, but the number of graduates in full-time, long-term bar passage required [FTLT BPR] jobs increased by even more — 3,731 — from 27,854 to 31,585!

You read that right. The increase in the number of graduates in FTLT BPR jobs between 2023 and 2024 exceeded the increase in the number of graduates overall between 2023 and 2024.

As a result, despite adding roughly 3,700 law graduates, law schools saw the percentage of graduates in FTLT BPR positions increase from 79.9% to 81.9% — the highest rate since records have been maintained. This is truly astonishing!

Trend from 2014 to 2024

For the graduating class in 2014, nearly 25,000 graduates found FTLT BPR jobs.

For the next several years, from 2015-2020, the number of graduates in FTLT BPR jobs fluctuated between a low of roughly 22,800 and a high of roughly 24,500.

During this period, I began wondering whether the number of graduates passing the July bar exam might be imposing an upper limit on the number of graduates reported as being employed in FTLT BPR positions.

As shown in the table above, in 2014, the number of graduates in FTLT BPR positions was roughly 73% of those graduates from ABA-accredited law schools who were first-time passers on the July bar exam. By 2018, this percentage had increased to 97%. By 2020 and 2021, this percentage was over 99%. In 2022 and 2023, this percentage exceeded 100%. (These results can be more than 100% given that the ABA definition for bar passage required positions includes positions for which the graduate need not pass the bar (judicial clerk) as well as positions for which the graduate may not have passed the bar but is expected to pass the bar to continue in the position.) (The data for the number of graduates passing the July 2024 bar exam on their first try has not yet been released by the NCBE, but I expect the number to be between 29,500 and 30,000.)

Since 2021, the number of graduates in FTLT BPR positions has been on the rise – 26,500 in FTLT BPR positions for 2021 graduates, 27,700 for 2022 graduates, 27,900 for 2023 graduates and now roughly 31,500 for 2024 graduates, the highest number ever, surpassing the previous high of roughly 30,500 for the graduating class in 2007, just prior to the great recession.

These data points for the classes of 2020 through 2023 suggest that perhaps the market for law grads who have passed the bar exam has been growing at a rate greater than the number of law grads who have actually passed the bar exam.

Possible Reasons for this Increase in Full-time, Long-Term Bar Pass Required Positions

What might explain this growing appetite for law grads in FTLT BPR positions?

I think the most likely explanation is demographic. The attorneys that started the significant, sustained growth in the legal profession in the late 1970s and early 1980s are finally starting to retire or die in significant enough numbers to counterbalance new entrants into the legal profession.

The chart above shows that between 1980 and 2015 the number of lawyers increased from roughly 500,000 to 1,300,000. From 1980 to 2000, the legal profession added about 25,000 lawyers each year, dropping to roughly 20,000 lawyers being added each year between 2000 and 2015. But since 2015, there has been little meaningful growth in the legal profession.

While the number of law school graduates fell to roughly 35,000 by 2017, the number actually passing the bar and getting admitted to practice was even lower, probably less than 30,000 annually for the period from 2017 to 2023 (including July and February takers).

It appears that the number of lawyers exiting the marketplace – through death, retirement, concerns about well-being, or simply a desire to pursue a different calling – has increased sufficiently over the last decade that more FTLT BPR positions were available to 2024 law school graduates than ever before.

This could be a blip. It could be that demand for law school graduates who had passed the bar exam in recent years exceeded the number of eligible graduates such that there was a little bit of pent-up demand that was satiated with the larger class of graduates in 2024. So perhaps this will ultimately be seen as the high-water mark.

But if, in fact, we have reached a point where the market for lawyers has “matured” and reached a new normal in terms of having the number of annual exits from the legal profession roughly equal the number of new entrants each year, this could mean that law schools and law graduates can expect that the gap between the number of law graduates and the number of FTLT BPR positions will remain relatively narrow compared to historical trends as shown in the next chart.

Of course, it is hard to make predictions with much confidence given the current economic turbulence and risk of a recession, along with a possible decrease in government jobs and the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, given that the number of law graduates will be smaller in 2025 and 2026 than for the class of 2024, any decline in the number of FTLT BPR jobs available for graduates likely will be counterbalanced by having fewer graduates.

(I am thankful for helpful comments on earlier drafts from Jim Leipold and my Holloran Center colleagues, Neil Hamilton and David Grenardo.)

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

April 22, 2025 by hami3258

Eric Shannon

In-House Counsel(or): The Case for Providing Integrated Mental Health Support Services to Law Students

By: Felicia Bennett, Holloran Center Coordinator

Eric W. Shannon, Associate Dean for Student Services & Adjunct Professor at St. John’s University School of Law, recently published an article in the University of Alabama’s Journal of the Legal Profession, Volume 49:1. This article, titled “In-House Counsel(or): The Case for Providing Integrated Mental Health Support Services to Law Students,” develops an argument around the responsibility of law schools for providing mental health support for their students.

In this article, Dean Shannon advocates for the importance of an integrated mental health professional (IMHP) that can support law students with the specific struggles they face as they prepare to enter a high-demand profession. He mentions the need for addressing ABA Standard 303(b)’s call for the development of a professional identity, which also includes the development of well-being practices. Dean Shannon explores court cases which relate to the need for counseling resources, explores the benefits of the IMHP model, and offers suggestions for schools that do not have the resources to follow this model.

The abstract of the article follows:

While some American law schools currently provide onsite mental health support services to their student populations, many still do not. This essay is the first to argue that all law schools should provide onsite mental health support services to their students—ideally, by way of a mental health professional integrated within the law school’s staff (an “integrated mental health professional,” or “IMHP”) who is familiar not only with the unique pressures of law school generally, but also with the school-specific environment. It explores current data on law student well-being as well as external considerations including ABA recommendations and standards for law schools related to mental health and wellness; the trend at law schools nationwide toward adopting IMHPs; and the risk of legal liability that can be mitigated by having an IMHP. It then describes the unique student support benefits yielded by adoption of the IMHP model. It concludes with recommendations for student affairs professionals at law schools that are unable to create an IMHP position.

We highly encourage any schools that are looking to build out a more robust mental health and wellness program to read this article as a starting point for thinking about how to better serve their students.

You can find the full article on SSRN. Please reach out to Eric Shannon at shannoe1@stjohns.edu with any questions or comments.

Associate Dean for Student Services and Adjunct Professor, St. John’s University School of Law; Cornell University, B.S.; Fordham University, M.S.T.; NYU School of Law, J.D.

April 16, 2025 by hami3258

Sara Berman

1L Success: Becoming a Lawyer, a Professional Identity Formation Workbook

By: Sara Berman, Professor of Lawyering Skills &
Director of the Academic Success Program, USC Gould School of Law

1L Success: Becoming a Lawyer, a Professional Identity Formation Workbook (West Academics, 2024) is an interactive workbook designed to infuse professional identity formation (PIF) content and an array of reflection opportunities for law students in a variety of settings including, but not limited to, orientations, ABA Standard 303(b) workshops, doctrinal courses (such as Professional Responsibility), skills classes, Academic Success Programs (ASP), and individual student counseling.

1L Success was intentionally created as a brief volume and written in straightforward language to promote accessibility. In schools with West Academic subscriptions, your students may access the electronic version for free with their West login.

If you are working with 1Ls –in a faculty or administrative position– or you’ve been tasked with programming on professional identity formation to satisfy ABA Standard 303(b), then this book is for you –well, for your students! The reflection exercises in the workbook will help students find strategies, tools, and meaning as they move along their success journey and begin developing their identity as future lawyers.

The book’s Foreword, written by the Holloran Center’s Co-Director Jerry Organ, gives additional perspectives on how this volume will be useful to today’s law students. It is with deep gratitude to Jerry, the Holloran Center, and everyone in legal education that I share information about this workbook. I hope that it will help us all in educating today’s and tomorrow’s lawyers.

Below is a chapter-by-chapter summary with ideas on where the content may fit into orientation, courses, workshops, and individual counseling of students. Because students can download the content for free, you can easily choose to use selected chapters or even selected reflections

Chapter 1 – Before Law School and Orientation – This brief content (7-pages) can help set a tone for discussion groups at Orientation. In particular, it directly hits and encourages reflection about the imposter syndrome that many people, especially first gen students, feel starting law school. It also helps students focus on their “why” and on the great value of being a lawyer –a why that will help throughout the entire professional journey.

Chapter 2 – Start on a Positive Foot: Your Path is not Predestined – These pages contain an array of reflections that will be useful to set a growth mindset and positive tone.

Chapter 3 – Become a Critical Reader – This content focuses on the importance of critical reading for law school success. It provides strategies and food-for-thought reflections that include focus and meaning in the readings.

Chapter 4 – Find Your Why – This content dives even deeper into encouraging and motivating students by helping them to step back and reflect on their own why. The reflections in this chapter provide tools for individual and group reflection exercises; teamwork and collaboration are consistently deemed important parts of law practice but are often not emphasized in law school.

Chapter 5 – Hard Work is the Most Important Part of Success – This content seeks to “normalize” hard work and self-driven work. It helps dispel myths that there is something wrong with students when law school learning doesn’t come easily.

Chapter 6 – Visualize Yourself as a Lawyer – This section is useful in discussion groups and individual reflection opportunities, empowering students by encouraging them to see themselves as lawyers. With this framing, many of the other goals of educating lawyers comes more easily and becomes more meaningful and tangible. (I frequently speak with students about “their future clients.” The entire perspective seems to change when they move beyond their student identity and begin to see themselves as lawyers.)

Chapter 7 – Enhance Focus, Reduce Distractions – This pairs well with student affairs, ASP workshops, and individual meetings to assist busy law students fighting distraction and promoting focus, a critical skill for effective lawyers.

Chapter 8 – Active Learning – This chapter can be used in Orientation and in mid-semester workshops as a springboard for discussion and reflections about the payoff of doing one’s own work and not relying solely on commercial study aids. It speaks to grit,work ethic, learning science, and self-driven learning –topics you may want to weave into orientation, courses, workshops, and student meetings.

Chapter 9 – Surround Yourself with Positive People – This is useful for Student Affairs and ASP and others working with first gen and other students who are struggling with finding a supportive community and tuning out overly competitive or negative peers. This chapter is also helpful for those who need assistance explaining the demands of law school to family, friends, and partners. There are sample dialogues and simulations that can be used as role-plays during orientation, workshops, and individual counseling.

Chapter 10 – Turn Panic into Power, Anxiety into Adrenaline – Useful for Student Affairs, ASP, and others who address law student anxiety throughout 1L and in workshops that prepare students for midterms and finals.

Chapter 11 – What is IRAC? – Useful at Orientation and in ASP, skills workshops, and individual meetings to demystify the recommended logical template for writing and thinking in law school. This content includes practice exams that test IRAC skills but are based on non-law hypos so that students can use them as learning opportunities (and opportunities to freely make mistakes!) at any point before or during 1L. Sample outlines and answers are also included at the end of the workbook, after the Glossary.

Chapter 12 – Daily Habits– Useful at Orientation and in professional identity formation workshops and individual meetings to help students become more intentional about incorporating professional perspectives into their daily habits and being more accountable to themselves and others for their actions.

Chapter 13 – Exams– Useful at Orientation and in ASP workshops and individual meetings to prepare law students for exams and help them see how different law school exams are from exams in their previous educational experiences. This helps enhance belonging in the sense that many first gen students and others who feel like they are “outsiders” think that some of their classmates have an edge.

Chapter 14 – Second Semester, Work on Improving from First Semester – Useful in spring or second semester workshops, classes, and individual meetings as a springboard for reflection on growth mindset and how to improve going forward.

Chapter 15 – Draft Your Law School Success Plan – This provides an adaptable tool that can be viewed as a living document to promote planning and reflection for continuous improvement throughout law school.

Chapter 16 – Thinking Ahead to After 1L – Useful for Career Services, Student Affairs, and others who are helping students to think about their professional goals and transferable skills.

Glossary – Useful for Orientation and throughout 1L as a springboard for exercises and reflection re: fluency of terminology. Knowing “the lingo” is critical for law school success and helps students socialize and acculturate to law school and the legal profession.

Please access the workbook here and feel free to reach out to Sara Berman at SBerman@law.usc.edu if you have any questions or comments.

Sara J. Berman is a professor of lawyering skills and the director of the Academic Success Program at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

June 5, 2024 by hami3258

Jerome Organ

Law School Transfer Data and Professional Identity Formation

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

This blog posting updates my blog postings over the last several years regarding what we know about the transfer market, for example 2022, 2021 and 2020. With the ABA’s posting of the 2023 Standard 509 Reports, we now have a decade of more detailed transfer data from which to glean insights about the transfer market among law schools, which has been in decline for most of the last decade. This posting also includes a new section on transfer “feeder schools” and some reflections on whether and how law schools might be providing opportunities for professional identity formation for their transfer students.

Numbers of Transfers and Percentage of Transfers Continue to Decline to the Lowest Levels in the Last Decade

As shown in Table 1 below, the number of transfer students received by law schools in 2023 decreased for the third consecutive year to 1162, the smallest number of transfers in the last decade. For the last several years, the transfer market has been shrinking, having declined from 5.5% in 2014, to 4.7% in 2016, to 3.4% in 2019, to 3.0% in 2022 and again in 2023. Aside from a slight bump in 2017, and another bump in 2020, this drop reflects a continuation of a gradual decline in transfers over the last several years – from nearly 2200 to less than 1200 and from 5.5% of first-years in the previous fall to 3.0% (both down over 45%).

Table 1 – Number of Transfers and Percentage of Transfers from 2014-2023
After an increase in transfers in 2020, we have seen declines in 2021 to 1375 and 3.6%, 2022 to 1231 and 3.0%, and 2023 to 1162 and 3.0% – the lowest number and percentage in a decade.

My sense is that the dramatic increase in scholarship assistance over the last decade, including the elimination of conditional scholarships at dozens of law schools, has made the financial equation associated with transferring much less attractive. (The number of law schools with conditional scholarship programs dropped from roughly 140 in 2011 to fewer than 80 as of 2020.) If a student were going to be paying full tuition at a given law school and could transfer to a much higher ranked law school in the region for only marginal additional cost (and perhaps without having to move), transferring might make sense. But if a student has to forego scholarship assistance and absorb significantly more financial cost to transfer, then staying at the student’s initial law school might seem to make more sense.

SOME LAW SCHOOLS CONTINUE TO DOMINATE THE TRANSFER MARKET

Table 2 below lists the top 15 law schools participating in the transfer market in descending order in Summer 2020 (fall 2019 entering class), Summer 2021 (fall 2020 entering class), Summer 2022 (fall 2021 entering class), and Summer 2023 (fall 2022 entering class).

(Note that in Table 2 and in Table 4, the “repeat players” are bolded – those schools in the top 15 for all four years are in black, those schools in the top 15 for three of the four years are in blue.) Seven of the top 15 for 2023 have been on the list for the largest number of transfers all four years, with four having been on the list for three of the four years (including 2023). Florida dropped out of the top 15 this year after having been in the top 15 the prior four years, while Florida State and Miami dropped out of the top 15 this year after having been in the top 15 the prior three years. There are four newcomers to the list in 2023: Vanderbilt, Florida International, Hofstra, and St. John’s. Table 2 also shows that for 2023, the concentration of transfers in the top 15 law schools for transfers increased back to 50%, where it was in 2020, up from 43% in 2021 and 47% in 2022.

TABLE 2 — Largest Law Schools by Number of Transfers from 2020-2023

As shown in Table 3 below, if we focus just on the top ten law schools for transfers in, the total number of transfers is 494 – 43% of all transfers – the highest percentage in the last decade.

TABLE 3 – Totals for Top Ten Law Schools for Transfers In as a Percentage of All Transfers for 2014-2023
In terms of law schools with the highest percentage of transfers in as a percentage of their previous year’s first-year class, as shown below in Table 4, eight law schools have been on the list each of the last four years – Chicago, Florida, Florida State, George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington, Northwestern and UNLV. Four law schools have been on the list three times in the last four years – Florida Int’l, Harvard, NYU, and Vanderbilt (including 2023). Two of the other three schools have been on the list in two of the last four years (including 2023) – Columbia and UCLA. The number of law schools welcoming transfers representing 20% or more of their first-year class has fallen from nine in 2013 (not shown), to none in 2019, four in 2020, two in 2021, and only one in 2022 and 2023 (Georgetown in both years).

TABLE 4 — Largest Law Schools by Transfers as a Percentage of Previous First-Year Class – 2020-2023
TRANSFER FEEDER SCHOOLS

TABLE 5 — Largest Law Schools by Transfers Out for 2021-2023

Eight law schools have been on the list of top transfer out law schools in each of the last three years – American, Barry University, Brooklyn Law School, George Washington University, Nova Southeastern, Touro University, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and the University of Miami. There are three additional law schools on the list in two of the last three years (including 2023): Boston University, Stetson University College of Law, and University of Maryland. In addition, there are three schools that made the list of the top-15 law schools for transfers out in both 2021 and 2022, but not in 2023: Southwestern University, St. Thomas University (Florida), and Widener University-Delaware.

Notably, two of these schools – George Washington University and Miami — show up on both the transfer out in Table 5 and the transfer in list above in Table 2. They are losing students to higher-ranked law schools and then back-filling with their own transfers from lower-ranked schools.

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MARKETS –

Starting in December 2014, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar began collecting and requiring law schools with 12 or more transfers in to report not only the number of students who have transferred in, but also the law schools from which they came (indicating the number from each law school). In addition, the law schools with 12 or more transfers in had to report the 75%, 50% and 25% first-year, law school GPAs of the students who transferred in. This allows one to look at where students are coming from and are going to, as well as the first-year GPA profile of students transferring in to different law schools.

Table 6 below focuses on the seven law schools in Table 2 that have been among the top-15 in terms of number of transfers in for each of the last four years, presented in descending U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) rank. Table 6 indicates the extent to which these seven law schools were attracting transfers from the geographic region in which they are located and highlights that the transfer market, to some extent, is a set of regional sub-markets.

TABLE 6 — Percentage of Transfers from Within Geographic Region 2021-2022-2023 and Top Feeder School for 2023 at the Seven Law Schools among the Top-15 for Transfers In for 2021, 2021, and 2023

All seven law schools had at least 35% of their transfers from the region in which they are located. Two of these seven law schools, Northwestern and Florida, obtained most of their transfers from within the geographic region within which the law school is located for the last three years, (with 80% for Northwestern and 60% for Florida in 2023). On the other hand, three law schools (Harvard and Georgetown and George Washington) had 48% or fewer of their transfers from within the region in which the law school is located in each of the last three years.

When one looks at the transfer out schools in Table 5 in comparison with the transfer in schools in Table 2, one can see some of the regional realities. In Florida, Barry University, Miami, Nova Southeastern, St. Thomas University, and Stetson are transfer feeder schools with Florida, Florida International, Florida State, and Miami receiving a number of those transfers. In the Mid-Atlantic, American, Baltimore, Catholic, George Washington University, and Maryland are transfer feeder schools with George Mason, Georgetown, and George Washington receiving a number of transfers. In California, Loyola Marymount, Southwestern, and the University of California College of Law San Francisco are transfer feeder schools with Loyola Marymount, University of California Berkeley, and University of California Los Angeles receiving a number of transfers.

Table 6 also identifies the law school that provided the largest number of transfers to each listed law school in 2023, as well as the percentage of transfers that came from that school. One of the seven law schools had a significant percentage (more than 20%) of its transfers in from one feeder school – Northwestern – with 25% of its transfers coming from Loyola-Chicago (and over 65% from Loyola/DePaul/UIC).

Notably, six of these seven law schools that are consistent players in the transfer market are on the East Coast (Harvard, Columbia, Florida, George Mason, Georgetown, and George Washington) while one is in the Midwest (Northwestern).

VARIED QUALITY OF THE TRANSFER POOL

Table 7 below shows the tiers of law schools from which these seven largest law schools in the transfer market for each of the last four years received their transfer students. Four of the seven law schools that consistently have high numbers of transfers in are ranked in the top 15 in U.S. News, while the other three are ranked between 28 (Florida and George Mason) and 41 (George Washington).

TABLE 7 — Percentage of Transfers from Different Tiers of School(s) for 2021, 2022 and 2023 at the Seven Law Schools Among the Top-15 for Transfers in 2021, 2022, and 2023

Two of the seven law schools – Harvard (no lower than 72%) and Columbia (no lower than 55%) — have consistently had large percentages of their transfers from law schools ranked between 1 and 50 in the U.S. News rankings. By contrast, in 2023, four of these seven law schools had more than 40% of their transfers from law schools ranked 101 or lower (Florida, George Mason, George Washington, and Northwestern).

TABLE 8 — First-Year Law School 75th/50th/25thGPA of Transfers in 2021, 2022, and 2023 at the Seven Law Schools among the Top-15 for Transfers in 2021, 2022, and 2023

Table 8 above highlights the reported GPAs of transfers in for these seven law schools. In looking at Table 8, one quickly sees that of the four law schools ranked in the U.S. News top-15, only one – Harvard — has a 50th GPA for transfers in 2023 that is above 3.9, and a 25th GPA of 3.8 and above. Harvard also is accepting most of its transfers in from top-50 law schools, making it clear that it is accepting transfers in who could have been admitted to Harvard in the first instance. Columbia is a close second, with all three of its metrics close to 0.1 below those of Harvard.

The other two top-15 law schools – Northwestern and Georgetown – are a step below in terms of the credentials of their transfers, with 50th GPAs of 3.75 and 3.67, respectively, and with 25th GPAs of 3.63 and 3.55, respectively, in 2023. In 2023, more than 65% of Georgetown’s transfers were from law schools ranked 51 or lower while 75% of Northwestern’s transfers were from law schools ranked 51 or lower. For Georgetown and Northwestern, with a majority of their transfers coming from law schools ranked outside the top 50, many of these transfer students may not have had the credentials to be admitted as first-year students at Georgetown or Northwestern.

Once you drop out of the top-15, the other three law schools – Florida (3.55), George Mason (3.42), and George Washington (3.35) – each has a 50th GPA well below that of the other four law schools on the list and 25th GPAs that drop to 3.33, 3.31, and 3.23, respectively. With 85% or more of these transfers coming from law schools ranked 51 or lower, these law schools clearly are welcoming a number of transfer students whose entering credentials almost certainly were sufficiently distinct from each of those law schools’ entering class credentials that the transfer students they are admitting would not have been admitted as first-year students in the prior year.

STILL MANY UNKNOWNS

Even with this more granular data now available, however, there still are a significant number of unknowns relating to transfer students, particularly regarding gender and ethnicity of transfer students and performance of transfer students at their new law school (both academically and in terms of bar passage and employment).

Are these law schools requiring transfers to take these courses with their incoming first-year students? Are there specific professional development or professional identity formation courses structured for transfer students at those law schools with a significant cohort of transfer students (10-15 or more)? Are there better ways to address the professional identity formation of transfer students that would help them integrate into the law school community into which they are transferring? These are questions for which additional research would be warranted.

Please feel free to contact me at jmorgan@stthomas.edu should you have any comments or questions.

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

May 7, 2024 by hami3258

Daisy Floyd, Patrick Longan, Timothy Floyd

West Academic Press Publishes Second Edition of The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer

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

Daisy Hurst Floyd
University Professor of Law and Ethical Formation
Mercer University School of Law

Timothy W. Floyd
Tommy Malone Distinguished Chair in Trial Advocacy
Mercer University School of Law

West Academic Press recently published the second edition of our book, The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer.

Our book is the product of over twenty years of experience teaching our required three-credit course on professional identity to Mercer’s first-year students. Our hope is that others can benefit from that experience, regardless of whether your efforts to help students develop their professional identities comes in a dedicated course, in a clinic, as part of another course such as professional responsibility, or in some other context.

We begin in Chapter 1 by defining professional identity as a lawyer’s deep sense of self as a lawyer. It is how a lawyer would complete an essay that begins, “I am the kind of lawyer who ….” We try to help the students understand that professional identity for lawyers is not just a matter of personal preference. As Interpretation 303-5 states, lawyers have special obligations to clients and to society, and “[t]he development of professional identity should involve an intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.” Internalizing those values is non-negotiable if the students are to fulfill their special obligations.

Our book presents professional identity formation as an exercise in virtue ethics. Chapter 2 explains that virtue ethics supposes there is an ideal to which one might strive. For example, we can imagine and describe the ideal doctor or the ideal teacher. Such descriptions inevitably include a list of virtues that a person should have and cultivate in order to approach that ideal. We then list for the students six virtues that need to be part of their professional identities as lawyers. We distilled these from the 100 or so professionalism codes and creeds that have been adopted around the country by courts and bar associations, as well as more recent work from Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers. Those virtues are competence, fidelity to the client, fidelity to the law, public spiritedness, civility, and practical wisdom. These are the “values and guiding principles” foundational to the profession and therefore essential to the development of professional identity.

The book then deals with these six virtues one chapter at a time. In each chapter, we elaborate on what the virtue means for lawyers, describe the obstacles they will encounter in practice to the deployment of the virtue, and explore some strategies for overcoming those obstacles.

Each chapter includes discussion questions and problems that we have road-tested in our course. These can be used for class discussion, written reflections, or both. We typically use a problem for in-class discussion and then have the students write a reflection on the exercise afterwards. We are working on a teacher’s manual that will be available in PDF format to help anyone using the book know what to expect from these exercises. In the meantime, of course, we are available to you to share our experiences.

The last chapter in the book is about the connection between having the right kind of professional identity and well-being in the profession. Interpretation 303-5 states that professional identity includes the well-being practices that are foundational to success in the profession. Here we emphasize the connection between developing an internal commitment to the cultivation of the six virtues and the lessons of positive psychology about the conditions that support well-being in one’s life. We present the theoretical framework of Self-Determination Theory and the empirical findings of Larry Kreiger and Ken Sheldon to help the students understand that there is a happy convergence between the needs of others and their own well-being: the more they internalize and cultivate the special values of the profession, the more they will derive deep satisfaction from their work.

If anyone has any questions or comments about the book or how you might use it, please get in touch with any of us (longan_p@law.mercer.edu, floyd_dh@law.mercer.edu, or floyd_tw@law.mercer.edu).

Timothy Floyd is the Tommy Malone Distinguished Chair in Trial Advocacy and Director of Experiential Education

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

February 6, 2024 by hami3258

Natt Gantt

The Centrality of Spiritual Well-Being to Professional Formation

By: L.O. Natt Gantt, II,* Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, High Point University Kenneth F. Kahn School of Law

In July 2023, I was pleased to moderate a discussion group titled “Professional Identity as a Search for Spiritual Well-Being—Helping Students Care for their Souls” at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) Conference. Having spent time reflecting on this session since last summer, I have been contemplating the depth and complexity of our task of helping students develop their professional identity. This task goes beyond encouraging students to engage in certain professional behaviors or even adopt specified professional values; it should involve helping them find purpose and meaning as they develop as a professional.

The session featured nine esteemed discussants: Professor Lisa Avalos from Louisiana State University; Paul M. Hebert Law Center; Professor Timothy Floyd from Mercer University School of Law; Professor Max Hare from Regent University School of Law; Professor Kendall Kerew from Georgia State University College of Law; Professor Kellyn McGee from Widener University Commonwealth Law School; Associate Dean David Miller from Liberty University School of Law; Professor Jerry Organ from the University of St. Thomas School of Law; Professor Lucas Osborn from Campbell University Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law; and Carwina Weng, Senior Specialist in Professional Identity Formation at LSAC. My former colleague from Regent University School of Law, Professor Ben Madison, developed the idea for the session and asked me to moderate.

During the two-and-a-half hour session, we had a rich discussion that focused on: (1) why the topic of law student spiritual well-being is important to discuss; (2) how to define the term “spiritual well-being”; (3) what practices and strategies can help law students cultivate their spiritual well-being; and (4) what are the challenges to improving students’ spiritual well-being and what are positive ways to overcome those challenges.

I was enthused about participating in the group because my work in law student and lawyer well-being has underscored to me how exploring the topic of spiritual well-being is a key component to the well-being crisis we face in legal education and the legal profession. The National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being’s groundbreaking 2017 report, The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change, raised this issue nearly seven years ago. In masterfully outlining an expansive definition of well-being, the Report defined well-being as “a continuous process in which lawyers strive for thriving in each dimension of their lives” and identified six dimensions of well-being: “emotional health, occupational pursuits, creative or intellectual endeavors, sense of spirituality or greater purpose in life, physical health, and social connections with others.”[1] More specifically, the Report defined spiritual well-being as “developing a sense of meaningfulness and purpose in all aspects of life.”[2]

Since 2017, many reports and studies have affirmed the reality of the well-being crisis in legal education and the legal profession.[3] Moreover, as Interpretation 303-5 in the ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools stresses, the relationship between well-being and professional identity formation is clear. The Interpretation provides, “The development of professional identity should involve an intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.”[4]

Regarding spiritual well-being specifically, social science and physiological research has found that spiritual and religious belief and practice can have significant health benefits. For instance, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Human Flourishing Program have conducted extensive research on the relationship between spirituality, most notably religious service participation, and well-being. This research has found that “the communal aspect of religion, namely service attendance, was inversely associated with various factors related to despair (e.g., lower risk of suicidality, heavy drinking, substance misuse, and depression)” and was “positively associated with psychosocial well-being outcomes, such as greater purpose in life.”[5] In addition, this research found that individuals who attend religious services at least weekly were significantly less likely to die from “deaths of despair,” such as deaths related to suicide, alcohol poisoning, and drug overdose.[6] The researchers point out that the social support individuals experience from such attendance explains only about a quarter of the effect and that religious community participation is a stronger predictor of health and well-being than other forms of social support.[7] The researchers thus opine that religious participation enhances health and well-being by providing individuals with a sense of “hope, meaning, and purpose in life.”[8]

Yet, despite the abundant research on well-being, the regulatory changes in the ABA Standards, and the ensuing well-being initiatives adopted in law schools and legal professional settings, the topic of spiritual well-being is often overlooked. It no doubt may be a difficult topic to discuss. Some may view the topic as only associated with a religious worldview and conclude that many lawyers and law students would not be interested in the topic because they do not come from a specific faith tradition. Others might similarly claim that most law schools are not faith-based and may face programmatic resistance to such efforts because discussing spiritual well-being could be perceived as imposing religious values. Still others might avoid the topic by asserting that it is difficult to measure and assess the success of efforts to cultivate spiritual well-being because the concept is too vague to fall within the proper purview of legal education. Finally, others might contend that students may have had negative experiences with religious communities in the past and therefore may be resistant to spiritual topics.

As the discussants in the session noted, each of these understandable concerns, however, does not override the importance of spiritual well-being as a foundational topic all law schools should consider in their professional formation efforts. The concerns about ties to specific religious worldviews and faith traditions belie the expansive definition in the National Task Force Report itself, which focuses on meaning and purpose with no expected connection to a specific faith tradition. The concern regarding measurement and assessment relates to professional formation generally, and many readers of this blog have already developed innovative and successful ways to assess professional formation in their students which could be adapted to assess spiritual well-being. Finally, the concern regarding negative experiences with religious communities relates to the first concern and can be addressed by honest and transparent discussions about these realities while recognizing that discerning meaning and purpose in life must not be shelved because of the troubling actions of some.

As we seek to shape students who are well and grounded, discussing spiritual well-being thus must be part of our professional formation process. Discussant David Miller powerfully observed that professional identity is downstream from personal identity. Even at the graduate, professional law school level, some of our focus must be on helping our students find purpose and meaning.

So what does it mean to help our students enhance their spiritual well-being? Here, the Task Force Report’s definition of spiritual well-being represents only a starting point. “Meaning and purpose” can be completely self-defining and self-serving. As I reasoned in our session, helping students find spiritual well-being must be more than affirming students who, for instance, find their meaning and purpose solely in making money so that they can accumulate physical possessions. Meaning and purpose must include more. That pursuit must connect to something beyond oneself—to the pursuit of justice, to the service of others, to the love of fellow humans, to the connection to the eternal and transcendent.

In her recent book The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life, Professor Lisa Miller at Columbia University describes extensive studies of the brain which find that spiritual and religious belief and practice have significant mental health benefits. She does not offer a precise definition of spirituality, but her research clearly supports a broad conception of the term, not tied to specific religious traditions.[9] At the same time, her research does not support a conception so broad as to include anything in which an individual might find purpose and meaning. Her research specifically traces the mental health benefits to when individuals experience a connection to someone or something beyond themselves—“a feeling of oneness with the environment or the divine; a sense of their own individual voice or identity dissolving into something larger around or beyond them.”[10] She writes that individuals with an awakened, healthy brain have experiences “involv[ing] self-transcendent awareness and relationship [which] induce a feeling of unity or closeness whether or not the content is explicitly relational [with other people].”[11]

The point in sharing Professor Miller’s words is not to advocate that law schools should create such experiences as part of their curricula. However, we are educating students who are confronting a well-being crisis in our profession and in our larger society,[12] and we must educate them on the mental health benefits of spirituality. In our discussion group, discussants presented strategies for how to enhance our students’ spiritual well-being, such as offering students more wholistic mentoring and opportunities for meditation and prayer, exposing students to moral exemplars who can encourage students’ pursuit of vocational purpose, having students write a statement of purpose or their personal philosophy of lawyering, and providing students with tactics they can use to better understand themselves and what values most inspire them.[13] The particular strategies a school adopts can and should vary based on the particular missional context in which each of our schools operates. Nonetheless, as we begin another year, I challenge our professional formation community to work collectively and creatively to help our students become spiritually well by finding purpose, meaning, hope, and connection in their vocational calling. If you have any questions or comments about this blog, please feel free to contact me at ngantt@highpoint.edu.

* Natt is Chair of the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs Well-Being Pledge Committee and a member of the Research & Scholarship Committee of the Institute for Well-Being in Law.

[1] National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being, The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change (Aug. 2017), at 9, https://lawyerwellbeing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Lawyer-Wellbeing-Report.pdf. In a diagram summarizing these six dimensions, the Report identified them as “Emotional, Occupational, Intellectual, Spiritual, Physical, Social.” Id.

[2] Id.

[3] See, e.g., “It is Okay to Not Be Okay”: The 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being, 60 Univ. of Louisville L. Rev. 441 (2021).

[4] Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, Am. Bar Ass’n, ch. 3 (2023–24), https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/standards/2023-2024/2023-2024-aba-standards-rules-for-approval.pdf (emphasis added).

[5] Ying Chen et al., Religious Service Attendance and Deaths Related to Drugs, Alcohol, and Suicide Among US Health Care Professionals, 77 JAMA Psychiatry 737, 738, 742 (2020) (citing studies).

[6] Id.

[7] See Tyler J. VanderWeele, Religious Communities and Human Flourishing, 26 Current Directions in Psych. Sci. 476, 478-79 (2017).

[8] Chen et al., supra note 5, at 738; see also id. at 743.

[9] As one example, Professor Miller’s brain research found “the moments of intense spiritual awareness were biologically identical whether or not they were explicitly religious.” Lisa Miller, The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life 162 (2021).

[10] Id. at 157.

[11] Id. at 161.

[12] See Madeline Holcombe, Welcome to the ‘new normal’ of people expressing low levels of well-being, according to a report (January 18, 2024), https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/18/health/gallup-well-being-2023-wellness/index.html.

[13] Specific approaches included having students work through self-assessment inventories, such as the VIA Character Strengths Survey and the exercises in Neil Hamilton’s book Roadmap: The Law Student’s Guide to Meaningful Employment.

January 30, 2024 by hami3258

Toni Jaeger-Fine

Introducing the Second Edition of Toni Jaeger-Fine’s Becoming a Lawyer: Discovering and Defining Your Professional Persona (2023)

By: Toni Jaeger-Fine, Senior Counselor, Fordham Law School; Principal, Jaeger-Fine Consulting

Jaeger-Fine’s concept of the Legal Professional Persona refers to a set of attitudes and behaviors that enable success and flourishing in the profession. As legal educators, students, and professionals, we tend to focus on legal knowledge and technical skills to the exclusion of these attributes that comprise the professional persona. The touchstone of cultivating a strong and sustainable professional persona is intentionality, and the goal of this book is to make each of us more deliberate about how we develop and nurture our professional identity.

This second edition is the product of conversations with, and feedback from, hundreds of law students and legal professionals, and the author’s own lifelong journey toward building and refining her own professional persona.

The book is divided into three main parts, reflecting the pillar of the professional persona: fundamentals; self-management; and relationships.

Fundamentals introduces the concept of the professional persona and its importance, discusses the state of today’s legal profession, and identifies the building blocks of a professional persona. In particular, this part examines how we move through stages of competence, the need to create sustainable habits and tools for doing so, the primacy of social and emotional intelligence, and the importance of leadership as a mindset and general orientation rather than a matter of position in a hierarchy.

Self-management—professionalism from the inside—addresses a range of issues relating to mindset and dispositions (such as a positive mindset, commitment to excellence, and character), time management and organization, and well-being. This part also offers a practicaand mindset approach to a sustainable form of well-being.

Relationships—professionalism with the outside—considers working with others, which embraces among other things the importance of inclusive thinking and controlling our cognitive biases, effective communication, managing up and down, and business development and client management. This part also covers talent management, development, and retention, including how to accelerate diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition, this part addresses ensuring that our public professional persona promotes our own professional identity, the goals of the institutions with which we are associated, and the profession more generally.

The book is eminently readable, and most chapters end with a series of questions for reflection, making this book readily adoptable for professional identity courses. Becoming a Lawyer: Discovering and Defining Your Professional Persona is available from West Academic or on Amazon. Please feel free to email me at tfine@fordham.edu if you have any questions or comments.

January 23, 2024 by hami3258

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