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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

Patrick Longan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 12, 2022 by hami3258

Angela Schultz

Can Participation in Pro Bono Service Increase Student Well-Being? I’ve Seen It Happen

By Angela F. Schultz, Assistant Dean for Public Service, Marquette Law School

I have been at Marquette Law School for eleven years. Over the years, I have witnessed students become more willing and able to identify and discuss mental health challenges they have faced in their own lives—challenges the students themselves have described as stress, anxiety, depression, and sometimes as trauma. I remember one recent student who lost both parents during their first year of law school. Another student took a leave of absence and was hospitalized for severe anxiety. If you work with law students, you also know some of the challenges facing students’ well-being.

I can think of three recent conversations where students identified their involvement in pro bono service as being among the factors that ultimately aided them on a path towards wellness. These three students’ experiences are not unique. Each year, we evaluate student experience in pro bono clinics. Comments from a recent survey included: “This work reminds me why I came to law school in the first place.” “I was afraid of working one-on-one with a client because I didn’t realize I already had skills that could be helpful.” “I feel connected to the people served in the clinic. These are my people.”

Before I go on, let me acknowledge that pro bono service can come with a dose of fatigue, vicarious trauma, and feeling overwhelmed by the poverty, despair, and inequity in our legal system and in our world. But right now, in this brief blog post, I’m focusing on how serving others can contribute to one’s well-being.

According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), all human beings require regular experiences of autonomy, competence, and relatedness to thrive and maximize their positive motivation. See Sheldon, Kennon M. and Krieger, Lawrence S., Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: A Longitudinal Test and Extension of Self-Determination Theory (July 2006). Pro bono service opportunities regularly offer all three.

Autonomy: Pro bono service often involves a student making a choice to engage in something of interest to them; to do something they want to do or something they believe in; and the ability to take initiative and be self-directed. At many law schools (though not all), pro bono is a voluntary activity. Students choose whether to get involved in pro bono service and how much service to do. Students often choose what kind of service to perform and may enjoy increased autonomy as they develop skills.

Competence: Pro bono clinics tend to be places where volunteers all get a chance to feel good at what they do, or at least the opportunity to make progress towards becoming good at what they are learning to do. Pro bono clinics are an avenue where students can gain skills. Looking again at the pro bono evaluation I send to students each year, students indicated the following skills were practiced frequently during pro bono service work: listening; the ability to see the world from another’s perspective; client interviewing; time management; communicating legal information in an understandable way to a client; creative problem solving; and legal/procedural issue spotting.

Relatedness: Pro bono service often (if not always) offers students opportunity to relate meaningfully with others. In our pro bono clinics (called, not surprisingly, the Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinics), law students are paired with volunteer attorneys to serve a client seeking civil legal aid. The lawyer/student pair gets to chat with each other and develop relationships. The client served by the lawyer/student pair typically brings a whole range of human experiences to the mix, from frustration and despair to hope and gratitude. The trio of lawyer, student, and client often laugh together, shake their heads in disturbance together, and sometimes experience victory together. For example, one team recently negotiated a $500 settlement during their time together with a creditor suing their client (a mother of three earning $16 per hour) when her cash loan of $250 ballooned quickly to $1,500. By the end of their two-hour shift, when victory had been achieved, the client asked me to take a photo of her with the law student and lawyer. Without a doubt, meaningful relatedness had occurred for everyone involved in that session.

Autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the experiences cited by research that lend to students’ feelings of positive motivation and well-being.

I’d like to suggest one more reason that pro bono involvement may lend to feelings of well-being: perspective.

Perspective: Pro bono service connects students to the community outside of law school. Law school takes up an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and money for months (and sometimes years) before the student even has their first day. Students sometimes live, drink, and breathe all things related to LSAT preparation. Then soon after they live, drink, and breathe all things related to the law school application process. Then the actual law school experience begins which often presents students with the most academically challenging materials they have seen throughout their education. And law school almost always involves a student’s first experience with a mandatory grading curve. Students’ social lives tend to fill quickly with other law students. The overall experience can be insular and leave students questioning their very identity: Who am I now? Who will I be once I graduate from law school?

Pro bono service is a quick and vivid reminder of the vast world outside of all-things-law-school. People seeking pro bono legal services are getting by (sometimes barely) while facing excruciating circumstances. A law students’ LSAT score is not even remotely part of the list of challenges facing a client in the legal clinic preparing to represent themselves in their eviction hearing tomorrow. The C- grade a law student received in civil procedure somehow seems miniscule once they are hearing directly from a survivor of domestic violence seeking a civil protection order.

The student who lost both parents during their first year of law school pointed to their experience in the pro bono clinics as a significant part of their path towards creating a “new normal” for themselves. And the student hospitalized for severe anxiety cited her work with “real people” in the pro bono clinics as part of her own journey towards wellness.

Please contact me at angela.schultz@marquette.edu with comments or questions.

Angela F. Schultz
Assistant Dean for Public Service
Marquette Law School
AALS Section on Pro Bono & Access to Justice, 2022 Chair

August 31, 2022 by hami3258

Thiadora Pina

California, but not Dreaming: The Story of a Successful Mandatory 1L Professional Identity Course

By Thiadora A. Pina, Clinical Professor & Director of the Externship Program,
Santa Clara University School of Law

At Santa Clara University School of Law (SC Law), our Critical Lawyering Skills Seminar is a mandatory, 1-credit first-year course. The course is designed to develop our 1L’s professional identity, which includes cultural intelligence, values, and law student and lawyer wellness. Since 2018, our course evaluations remain overwhelmingly positive. Moreover, this high level of success is consistently achieved across eighteen small sections and all ten professors who teach this course.

The 1L Critical Lawyering Skills Seminar (CLSS) develops our law students’ professionalism by focusing on the top lawyering competencies students need to succeed and enter practice. Fortunately, we do not have to guess or rely on individual ideas or experiences to understand how law students can best prepare to enter the legal market and thrive as new lawyers. The work has been done for us.

There are multiple studies that clearly tell us which skills, characteristics, and values are important for new and successful lawyers. CLSS uses this data, in conjunction with the principles of positive psychology and andragogy, to ground its pedagogy. CLSS relies on the following studies:

Foundations for Practice (IAALS) (2016)
Attorneys General/Non-Profit (ROADMAP) (2018)
Small and Large Firms (ROADMAP) (2018)
Predicting Lawyer Effectiveness (Shultz/Zedeck) (2011)
Building a Better Bar (IAALS) (2020)

CLSS helps students think strategically about their professional identity and the critical skills they need to practice law successfully by focusing on the top competencies these studies identified as necessary for first-year lawyers. Collectively, the following competencies bubbled to the top:

Because SC Law was an early adopter of this focused pedagogy, the challenge was how to teach and scale this course across the 1L class. Other than Neil Hamilton’s ROADMAP text, no other widely circulated curriculum focused on law student professional identity formation. Nonetheless, SC Law remained committed.

This commitment eventually led to developing and adopting a professional identity curriculum packaged (with ROADMAP) into an interactive Workbook, Essential Lawyering Skills: A Companion Guide to Neil W. Hamilton’s ROADMAP (ELS), published in September 2021 by ABA Publishing.

ELS is data driven and builds upon ROADMAP’s strong foundation by providing activities that personalize each student’s path to professional identity and meaningful employment. ELS enables students to take charge of their own professional development and strengthen the lawyering skills legal employers have identified as necessary for first-year lawyers to succeed.

Because CLSS is a mandatory first-year experiential course, SC Law designed its curriculum for consistency. When ELS is paired with ROADMAP, the ELS Student Workbook and ELS Professor Manual provide a turnkey solution for those instructors and schools focused on law student professional development.

Essential Lawyering Skills: Thiadora A. Pina, Laura E. Jacobus, Rupa Bhandari (ABA Publishing, 2021). Visit the ABA website or https://www.pinbuspd.com/ for more information.

The ELS Workbooks are also adaptable. For example, some schools may not have dedicated professional identity courses, or they may choose to teach large class sections or teach during orientation or school breaks. The ELS Workbooks have a modular design, which can be separated into different parts. Schools and professors may choose any individual module or pair several modules together.

The “traditional” course syllabus for the class only includes SC Law requirements and basic class policy, but the content of the class can be found in the ELS Workbook that each small section of CLSS uses. Attached below are the Table of Contents for the ELS Student Workbook (SW) and the ELS Professor Manual (PM), which provide a substantive preview of the class.

ELS Student Workbook (SW) and the ELS Professor Manual (PM)

You are also welcome to contact Thiadora Pina directly: tpina@scu.edu with questions regarding either the books or the CLSS course. Good luck and have fun implementing the new Standard!

Thiadora A. Pina
Clinical Professor
Director, Externship Program
Faculty Advisor: BLSA + First-Gen Law Student Association
Santa Clara University School of Law
Essential Lawyering Skills (ABA 2021)
email | tpina@scu.edu
Website | https://law.scu.edu/externship/
phone | 408.551.3268

August 29, 2022 by hami3258

Christopher Corts

Better Conversations? Let’s Talk About It

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

Hello, reader! Today I am writing the first of a two-part series that will explore why and how we might facilitate better public conversations, especially when they include controversial topics. In today’s entry, Part I, I will explain why I think new ABA Standards 303(b) and (c) present an opportunity to have some hard but necessary public conversations. I will also share some thoughts on why we should have those conversations, why those conversations can be so difficult, and what we can reasonably expect them to accomplish. (Spoiler alert: not much! Even so, I think they are important for reasons I will explain.)

In a future blog post, Part II, I will give concrete ideas for how to plan and facilitate public conversations in a slower, less reactive, more intentional, inclusive, and meaningful way.

Whenever I facilitate a public conversation, my aim is to try and find a way to facilitate mutual compassion, respect, and trust among participants from the very start. Trust makes broader participation more likely. In my experience, when trust exists, it can also improve the quality of conversation by improving the likelihood that candid, authentic points of view will be voiced—and heard. We should want everyone to leave the conversation thinking something like: “I appreciate the opportunity to finally speak from my heart, and I have appreciated hearing others speak from theirs.” (Why I think this is so important will likely become clearer as you read on.)

Facilitating these kinds of conversations will be especially important as we implement new ABA standard 303(b) & (c). At the risk of understatement: there is nothing close to universal agreement about these standards. Even so, they exist. Now what?

Well…let’s talk about it.

For the unfamiliar: new ABA standard 303(b) mandates that “a law school shall provide substantial opportunities to students for…the development of a professional identity.” New ABA Standard 303(c) specifies that, as part of its curriculum, “a law school shall provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.”[i]

Considered together, these two new standards suggest that, if we are going to effectively teach students how to internalize a professional responsibility for clients and the integrity of the legal system [as we must, under Standard 303(b)], we must help students learn how to detect, address, and overcome the pernicious effects of racism and bias [Standard 303(c)] in our own profession.

“We” cannot credibly pretend to hold a unified, consensus point of view on any of this. And if you disagree with me …I invite you to take issue with me which helps to illustrate the point.

Talking about racism and bias introduces language, concepts, and (different) preferred modes of discourse. Educating students about racism and bias from a distance will not do. We desperately need to assume a curious, searching, self-aware, self-critical approach. And as we do: welcome the many different perspectives on what is worthy of criticism in our community.

This might be unpleasant—but it is not unhealthy. A healthy community must learn to live in conversation with itself through serious conflicts, or it cannot exist as a community. We need to model for our students a way of facilitating conversations designed to do that. Especially because we live and work in a dominant culture that indulges in calling-out more than conversation, values casting-out more than confession, and is more eager to cancel—or complain about cancelling—than showing signs of contrition.

We are a roiling mess, you may have noticed.

The American Bar Association’s “Profile of the Profession,” published annually, can help us start the hard conversations that we need to have. Before we get to any discussion of values, politics, perceptions, policies, aspirations, or goals….we need to understand who “we” are, demographically, and work our way out from there. Historically—and in the year 2022, specifically—where, when, and how well have we included (dare we ask: how well have we welcomed?) people of color, women, sexual minorities, people with disabilities, and other historically-excluded-or-marginalized people into all the corners of our profession?

To be sure, the data paints an encouraging picture of progress. Things are better, yes! And still so horrible. The data also paints a sobering, bleak, and utterly pathetic picture of how we continue to struggle to undo the stubbornly pernicious effects of America’s long history of racism, bias, and exclusion. With a shared understanding of the current demographic data (and recent trends) in view, we can move on to voicing the harder, more contestable, and wildly variable personal perceptions, beliefs, experiences, commitments, political convictions, and values that, collectively, are represented among us.

My own experience participating and facilitating hard conversations began over two decades ago, prior to law school, in a different profession. While pursuing a master’s degree in theology, I began to train and engage in ecumenical and inter-religious dialogues about a range of hotly-contested political, theological, and social issues. In recent years, in partnership with the Inner Work Center (formerly known as the Chrysalis Institute, located in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia), I have moderated a series of public conversations involving faith leaders who represent six of the world’s religious traditions, on a range of hot topics related to living, dying, sin, grace, justice, and social transformation. And, like all law professors, I have had many opportunities to either participate in or facilitate hard conversations in and out of the classroom with students, faculty, staff, and alums. (Most recently, these kinds of conversations have tended to recur in my work as a co-facilitator of a spiritual well-being program for first-generation 1Ls, called Just Practice; as co-facilitator of a Law, Race, and Power (LRP) Speaker’s Series; and as co-facilitator of a LRP spin-off program, Let’s Talk About It).

All of these experiences have helped me appreciate the value of a form of conversation that is distinct from arguments or debates. The point of these conversations is to speak with courage, hear with compassion, and be heard without being contradicted. And, by doing that, to simply know ourselves and each other better.

The starting point for these conversations is a mutual agreement to forswear any attempt to try and correct or convert dissenters. All speakers are liberated to voice their point of view without being interrupted, corrected, confronted, contradicted, or condescended-to. It is conversation that permits error, tolerates confusion, extends grace to the mistaken or offensive. It is focused on bringing hidden things to light—the deepest hopes, fears, grievances, and frustrations that too often remain hidden beneath the surface in everyday discourse. It is not a conversation that is burdened by usefulness; it is not designed to fix anything, resolve anything, or identify any commonality or unity. It is conversation that is beautiful and pleasing because it invites everyone present to speak and be heard if they wish, on topics of their choosing.
At their best, these kinds of public airings elucidate the sharp contours of conflict and difference. It’s hard work; many of us prefer conflict-avoidance. Speaking with candor and authenticity takes courage, but hearing those things without reacting or making snap-judgments does, too. To speak and hear things that expose deep differences requires a kind of humility and curiosity, a willingness to risk, and a radical tolerance. The goal is to get it all out—to hear “it” all, whatever “it” may be. And then to just let it be, for now.

In my experience, these kinds of conversations can be hard in two senses. First, they require at least some participants to hear and understand information that is in tension with—or possibly even in direct contradiction to—their perceptions, values, political commitments, religious convictions, or personal experiences. Everyone will likely hear (albeit at different times) stupid, offensive, wrong-headed, poorly-reasoned, outrageous, misguided, flat-wrong things. But this is not a problem; it is the point, really.

And so, hard as it may be…to engage in this conversation requires everyone to buy-in to the premise that it might be difficult to join in this conversation. Public displays of emotion are possible, maybe even likely. And that is ok. And everyone, of course, must be free to exit themselves from the conversation if they wish, whenever they wish.

These kinds of conversations are also “hard” in a second sense—in the way that they can tax the patience and goodwill of everyone participating in them. These kinds of conversation take a lot of time, intention, planning, and discipline. Bluntly: hard conversations do not seem to accomplish much. This can be especially irritating for lawyers, who tend to suffer from acute time deprivation. Most of us have been taught to value efficiency, crave productivity, and adopt a bias toward action. We are valued for our issue-spotting and problem-solving capabilities. It is hard to have a conversation that is not a means to some clear, desirable end.

For me? They can be difficult. But I have learned to appreciate how these conversations give a clearer field of perception, a sharper and more nuanced view of just how diverse, different, disunified, and riddled with conflict, division, and disagreement we really are. And I experience a strange satisfaction when, after the conversation, I can continue to dialogue and converse casually with the participants knowing more about just how radically different we are, in some ways—while enjoying the mystery of how we are able to co-exist with genuine kindness, respect, and civility, just the same.

On that hopeful and buzz-killing note, I will conclude this Part I. Next time, in Part II of this series, I will share concrete suggestions for how you might plan and execute public conversations about difficult topics in a way that is most likely to include the most people and elicit the most candid, forthright, and sincere comments possible—especially the ones that are voiced in criticism or dissent.

Until then…if you have any questions, concerns, or comments you would like to share, please email me! I would love to hear from you. You can reach me at ccorts@richmond.edu.

Christopher Corts, Contributor

[i] For a helpful introduction to these standards, see Neil W. Hamilton and Louis D. Bilionis, “Revised ABA Standards 303(b) and (c) and the Formation of a Lawyer’s Professional Identity, Part 1: Understanding the New Requirements,” PDQ in NALP Bulletin+ (May 2022).

August 26, 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

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