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Neil Hamilton

The Profession Has Core Values the Students Can Explore in Guided Reflection

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

Accreditation Standard 303(b) asks legal educators, including faculty and staff, to engage students in “an intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.”  Some legal educators may be asking whether the profession has core values and guiding principles and whether the new standard requires imposing these values and principles on our students.  This essay focuses first on what are the core values and guiding principles of the legal profession?  The essay then turns to a second question of how most effectively to engage students in an intentional exploration of the core values and guiding principles.

What are the legal profession’s core values and guiding principles?

In my experience, many legal educators have not done an in-depth exploration leading to a clear definition of the core values and guiding principles of our profession.  They are in fact living into a set of professional values and guiding principles, but it may be challenging to write them down.  The values and principles may seem inchoate initially when written down.  This exploration was not part of our law school experience.

Reflecting on my own law school experience many years ago, I remember that the major core value modeled in every course was that I should strive to become a craftsperson of the law, demonstrating the highest level of all the technical skills of being a lawyer, as my professors both modeled and asked me to demonstrate.  I don’t remember any discussion or guided reflection on this or other core values.

I think many legal educators today, especially in experiential education, engage students on core professional values and principles, but my experience is that few law schools as a community of practice together have reflected on, discussed, and agreed upon the core values and guiding principles of that school’s community of practice.  Standard 303(b) is inviting the faculty and staff of each law school to engage collegially in intentional exploration of that community of practice’s understanding and definition of the core values and guiding principles of the profession.

As a starting place for this collegial intentional exploration of the core values and guiding principles of the profession, the Holloran Center has synthesized a succinct definition from the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the four major reports on professionalism from the ABA and the Conference of Chief Justices, and Holloran Center research.[1]  There are two foundational core values that law students and lawyers must understand, internalize, and demonstrate:

  1. a deep responsibility and commitment to serving clients, the profession, and the rule of law;
  2. a commitment to pro-active continuous professional development toward excellence at all the competencies needed to serve others well in the profession’s work.

These are the same foundational core values for all of the peer-review professions, such as medicine, nursing, and engineering.[2]

For a longer definition of the profession’s core values and guiding principles, Holloran Center borrowed directly from the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, adopted by all 50 states.

Law students and lawyers should understand, internalize, and demonstrate:

  1. a deep responsibility and service orientation to others, especially the client, whom the student serves in widening circles as the student matures including a commitment to:
    • zealously protecting and pursuing a client’s interests within the bounds of the law while demonstrating respect for the legal system and a courteous and civil attitude toward all persons involved in the legal system;
    • improving the law, providing pro bono service to the disadvantaged, developing cultural competence, and promoting a justice system that provides equal access and eliminates bias, discrimination, and racism in the law;[i]
    • developing and being guided by personal conscience—including the exercise of “sensitive professional and moral judgment” and the conduct of an “ethical person”—when deciding all the “difficult issues of professional discretion” that arise in the practice of law; and
    • developing independent professional judgment, including moral and ethical considerations, to help the client think through decisions that affect others;
  1. pro-active continuous professional development toward excellence at all the competencies needed to serve others in the profession’s work well; and
  2. compliance with the minimum standards of competency and ethical conduct in the Rules of Professional Conduct.

How do we most effectively engage students in an intentional exploration of these core values and guiding principles?

New Interpretation 303-5 emphasizes two of the most important curricular principles to engage students in an intentional exploration of these core values and guiding principles.

  1. Each student should have frequent opportunities for reflection on these core values and principles in courses and co-curricular and professional development activities; and
  2. Each student’s growth toward later stages of development regarding these core values and guiding principles will occur over time.

My earlier blog post on the Standard 303 revisions emphasized that the new standards require law schools to move toward a coordinated progression of guided reflection modules in the curriculum to foster each student’s growth in exploring these core values and principles.

Law Student Professional Development and Formation: Bridging Law School, Student, and Employer Goals (2022) outlines eight additional curricular principles that will foster each student’s exploration of these core values and principles.

The core values and principles discussed in this document come directly from the legal profession’s own rules of conduct, studies conducted of lawyers, and extensive research regarding the values and principles exhibited in the legal profession.  It is important to understand that professional identity formation does not involve legal educators “instilling” or “inculcating” these core values and principles into students.  Rather, professional identity formation entails explicitly and intentionally identifying and sharing these values and principles with law students.  Each student then engages in an exploration of and guided reflection upon the core values and guiding principles of the profession that lead to successful legal practice. It is a life-long exploration for each lawyer.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, then please contact me at NWHAMILTON@stthomas.edu.

Neil Hamilton is the Holloran Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota.

[1] See William Sullivan et al, EDUCATING LAWYERS: PREPARATION FOR THE PROFESSION OF LAW 128-40 (2007); Neil Hamilton, Professionalism Clearly Defined, 18 THE PROF. LAWYER 4-20 (No. 4, 2008); Neil Hamilton, Assessing Professionalism: Measuring Progress in the Formation of an Ethical Professional Identity, 5 U. ST. THOMAS L.J. 470,482-83 (2008); Neil Hamilton, Fostering Professional Formation (Professionalism): Lessons From Carnegie Foundation’s Five Studies on Educating Professionals, 45 CREIGHTON L.R. 763-97 (2012).

[2] See Neil Hamilton, The Core Values of the Service Professions and an Effective Curriculum to Help Students Internalize Them, in EDUCATING ETHICS ACROSS THE PROFESSIONS: A COMPENDIUM OF RESEARCH, THEORY, PRACTICE, AND AN AGENDA FOR THE FUTURE (R. Jacobs ed., 2022).

[3] Note that new interpretation 303-6 provides that the core values and responsibilities of the profession should include the importance of cross-cultural competence and the obligation of lawyers to promote a justice system that provides equal access and eliminates bias, discrimination, and racism in the law.

November 22, 2022 by
Janet Stearns

Teaching “Reflection & Growth” Through Mindfulness

By: Janet Stearns, Dean of Students, University of Miami School of Law

In this past year, I enjoyed some significant opportunities to advocate, negotiate, and study the new ABA standards. I return often to the text and context of the Standards and interpretations and consider how this language is challenging us in our critical roles in law schools today. In review, the comment to Standard 303 guides us:

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. Because developing a professional identity requires reflection and growth over time, students should have frequent opportunities for such development during each year of law school and  in a variety of courses and co-curricular and professional development activities.(emphasis added).

How do we teach the foundational skills of ‘reflection and growth” as part of well-being practices in law school? One very significant contribution to answering this question is through the teaching of Mindfulness in law schools.

My colleague and friend Professor Scott Rogers has written a fabulous and important resource—The Mindful Law Student: A Mindfulness in Law Practice Guide. Scott serves as Lecturer in Law and Director of University of Miami School of Law’s Mindfulness in Law Program and Co-Director of the University of Miami’s Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. Scott is also a co-president of the national non-profit Mindfulness in Law Society. Scott has spent more than a decade collaborating on peer-reviewed neuroscience research assessing the efficacy of mindfulness training and shares a series of core practices that have been part of this research and are among those found in many well-respected mindfulness training programs. This Practice Guide was published in September by Edward Elgar publishing and is thus a very new tool in our toolbox for teaching mindfulness.

Overview: The Mindful Law Student

The Mindful Law Student is both profound and concise. The materials build upon Scott’s teaching at the University of Miami for the past 15 years. I have been blessed to have a “front row seat” and observe the evolution of Scott’s teaching from his first arrival at Miami Law. Having seen and heard many of his presentations over this time, I was tremendously impressed by Scott’s ability to pull together this complex body of work into such a focused and readable text.

The book is divided into three parts, each consisting of 5 chapters. The first part is called “Mindfulness Elements” and includes a discussion of Leadership, Attention, Relaxation, Awareness, and Mindfulness.  This material is foundational and elucidates the relevance of this topic to every aspect of our personal and professional lives. Part II is “Mindfulness and You” and features specific strategies relating to Solitude, Connection, Self-Care, Movement, and Practice. As Scott tells us:

The chapters in Part II can be read in any order, and you may find them to be useful interludes that complement the readings in Part I.

(I will admit that I read them “in order” the first time but see the opportunities to return to them in different orders, and that this would be welcoming to students.)

Part III, Mindfulness Integrations, raises our awareness of the ways that Mindfulness can affect our lawyering in the areas of Listening, Negotiation, Judgment, Creativity, and Freedom. This section included some very significant “aha” moments for me. For example, in Chapter 11 on Listening, Scott talks about the tendency of lawyers (and physicians) to interrupt their clients and patients. He then offers very specific guidance on how to transition to a mindful listener. Chapter 12 on Negotiation highlights the value of mindful attention to understand better our counterparties and moving beyond self-centered thinking to productive negotiation strategies. Returning to our main theme of professional identity, Part III makes clear the integral role of a mindfulness and reflective practice in performing key elements of our work as lawyers.

Some Special Gems in The Mindful Law Student

Each chapter skillfully integrates scholarship and key teachings on Mindfulness with elements that make this particularly accessible to law students. For one, Scott features seven fictional, diverse law students who face academic and professional challenges and find a pathway for Mindfulness to assist each of them. Each chapter also includes some insightful visualizations and images that capture main concepts. As a visual learner myself, I find these images particularly captivating. Scott is most adept with his key “metaphors”—a reader of the book will quickly understand the images of the flashlight (of attention), the snow globe (of life’s confusing moments), the lightbulb (for awareness), and the spirals (of over-reaction). These images return throughout the book.

Most chapters introduce readers to a different mindfulness practice that connects to that chapter’s subject matter.  A website for the book offers a series of 6-, 12-, and 18-minute versions of each practice, which students can also access via a free app. Scott provides access to practice scripts for those faculty who may wish to offer live guidance in class.

The text skillfully integrates the teachings of many great thinkers, from Rumi and Buddhist devotees to musicians like Herbie Hancock and Supertramp, from civil rights leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois to contemporary lawyers and judges who practice mindfulness.

The Mindful Law Student includes specific exercises and probing questions for meditation and self-reflection at the end of each chapter. Mindfulness requires practice and this is a practice guide. Each chapter also highlights key Trials and Takeaways, which are summaries of main concepts and areas for future work. Finally, each chapter has a concise but helpful list of references and resources for those who might want to dig deeper into any subject.

Chapter 14, “Creativity,” challenges the reader to connect with one’s creative soul through art and poetry. I felt the need to accept that challenge and take the “first step” on that “journey of a thousand miles.” The text discusses the Haiku structure, composed of three-line stanzas of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. I took the plunge, and so here I share my first mindful Haiku with you, inviting our readers to consider your own creative endeavors.

Haiku #1

Powerful Law profs

Changing the world mind by mind

Moment by moment

 

Guiding law students

Capable of breath, thoughts, dreams

The key: mindfulness

 

Reflective lawyers

Navigating this world with

Equanimity

 

Strategies for Using The Mindful Law Student

This Practice Guide can be integrated in a number of productive ways into the law school experience of teaching professional identity. Some options might include:

-A stand-alone course on Mindfulness. The fifteen chapters would be a successful outline of a weekly course dedicated to exploring the practice and applications of Mindfulness in the Law.

-The book, at just over 200 pages, could be on a recommended summer reading list for new law students, and then form the basis for well-being and orientation programming.

-The sections of the text that focus on listening, negotiation, judgment (and ethics), leadership, and creativity could be part of courses that focus on these particular skills, or included in law clinics, externships, or other experiential learning classes where these skills are taught.

As we explore new curricular options and models around professional identity in 1L and upper-level courses, consider whether The Mindful Law Student would be an appropriate addition to your curriculum.

For More Information:

Contact Elgar Publishing for a copy of The Mindful Law Student so that you can consider strategies for integrating this practice guide into your professional identity teaching.

www.themindfullawstudent.com

Other useful resources include:

Mindfulness in Law Society website:
https://www.mindfulnessinlawsociety.org/

UMindfulness at the University of Miami
https://umindfulness.as.miami.edu/

Mindfulness in Law Program at the University of Miami School of Law
https://www.law.miami.edu/academics/programs/mindfulness/index.html

Please feel free to reach out to me at jstearns@law.miami.edu if you have any questions or comments.

Janet Stearns is Dean of Students at the University of Miami School of Law and Chair of the ABA COLAP Law School Committee.

November 17, 2022 by
Leah Teague

“The Difference Makers”: Professional Identity of Lawyers in America

By: Leah Witcher Jackson Teague, Professor of Law & Director of Business Law Programs, Baylor Law School

As law schools consider suitable approaches to professional identity formation, insight can be found in applicants’ personal statements. Many aspiring law students express a desire to “make a difference.” Students enter our law schools committed to using their time, talent, and efforts as lawyers to make a difference in the lives of clients or in their community or to have an impact that ripples throughout society. They want to solve problems for individuals who are less fortunate or to positively impact a larger group for the “greater good.” Law school personnel applaud those intentions for we know that lawyers are difference makers. It is part of our professional identity and our obligation to society. Shouldn’t law schools strive to equip and inspire law students to be difference makers?

The Preamble to the ABA Model Rules for Professional Conduct provides instruction about the role of lawyers in America: “A lawyer is a representative of clients, an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.” Lawyers have a special obligation to society as keepers of the rule of law and protectors of individual freedoms and rights. And as clients and organizations look to us for representation, guidance, and leadership, lawyers have the opportunity to address important issues that impact not only our nation but also the future of the legal profession. A law student’s journey to becoming an honorable member of this profession should include attention to these important issues and the role of lawyers in helping to secure our nation’s system of governance.

At Baylor Law, professional development and informal leadership development have always been woven into the education and training of every Baylor Law student. From the emphasis on service during the first day of orientation through our nationally-renowned third-year Practice Court program, Baylor Law faculty strive to develop individuals who will be prepared for the challenges of the legal profession and equipped to serve effectively. As a result, we proudly watch Baylor Lawyers serve their clients effectively and lead within the profession and throughout their communities.

In 2014, we implemented two programs to be more intentional about preparing our students to enter the profession as competent and prepared professionals who are ready to serve and lead. Both programs have been recognized by the ABA with its prestigious E. Smythe Gambrell Professionalism Award. In 2018, our Practice Ready Professional Development Program received the Gambrell award. This past August, Baylor Law’s innovative Leadership Development Program was honored with the recognition.

In future posts we will provide more details about recent changes to our professional identity formation efforts, including the expansion of our Professional Development Program. Through our required Professional Development Program, students must attend 21 professional development training sessions (60 to 90 minutes each). Some are mandatory, but most are not, giving students options from a wide variety of subjects. We offer between 6 and 10 sessions each of our four academic terms per year to provide students with a selection of topics that are aligned with their career aspirations.

Our Leadership Development Program focuses on professional competencies and skills that better prepare students for the challenges that await them after graduation and that better equip them for the important roles they will assume as they enter our noble profession. The objectives of the Leadership Development Program are to encourage and assist law students to:

  1. Embrace their professional identity as they serve clients and society;
  2. Develop competencies and skills to succeed; and
  3. Boldly seek opportunities to make a difference in the profession, their communities, and the world.

We want to help them become their best self and reach their potential. Throughout their time at Baylor, we strive to introduce students to values-based professional development and leadership development concepts that provide the means to be more effective difference makers by helping them:

  • better understand their talents and shortcomings;
  • garner courage to make course corrections as appropriate;
  • improve their professional skills;
  • make decisions guided by ethics and values;
  • embrace failure as opportunities for growth;
  • value differences when working with others;
  • build stronger, productive working relationships with others;
  • think strategically and imagine possibilities;
  • prioritize wellness for themselves and others; and
  • seek to add value wherever they go.

Even before the new requirements in the amendments to ABA Standard 303(b) we sought to address the professional identity formation of our law students. The recent amendments provided an opportunity to consider further enhancements to our program. We look forward to sharing our progress with you in future posts.

Thanks to each of you for your good efforts! I know the work can be challenging and the progress dilatory, but I am so encouraged by all the consequential work occurring throughout legal education

For more information, please feel free to reach out to me at Leah_Teague@baylor.edu.

Leah Witcher Jackson Teague is the Professor of Law and Director of Business Law Programs at Baylor Law School.

November 10, 2022 by
Neil Hamilton

The Standard 303 Revisions Require a Developmental Sequence of Modules in the Curriculum

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

The Standard 303 revisions require each law school, over time, to move toward a developmental sequence of modules fostering student reflection and growth regarding professional identity.

  1. New Standard 303(b)(3) requires that “a law school shall provide substantial opportunities to students for the development of a professional identity.” (emphasis added regarding the developmental nature of professional identity and the number of opportunities).
  2. New Interpretation 303-5 defines professional identity. “Professional identity focuses on what it means to be a lawyer and the special obligations lawyers have to their clients and society. The development of a professional identity should involve an intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.” (emphasis added regarding the developmental nature of professional identity).
  3. New Interpretation 303-5 continues, “Because developing a professional identity requires reflection and growth over time, students should have frequent opportunities for such development during each year of law school and in a variety of courses and co-curricular and professional development” (emphasis added regarding the developmental nature of professional identity and the number of opportunities).

The Standard 303 revisions clearly require each law school to create a developmental sequence of opportunities for reflection and growth over time so that each student explores and internalizes the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice. This developmental sequence of opportunities to foster each student’s professional identity requires coordination and progression among the modules.

The empirical research on professional identity formation strongly supports guided reflection in one-on-one coaching (especially in the context of authentic professional experiences) as the most effective curriculum to foster this type of student growth. The one-on-one coaching engagements also provide some basis for expert observation necessary for program assessment of our professional identity learning outcomes. There is no empirical evidence that doctrinal coverage and analysis of professional identity topics without guided reflection will make any difference with respect to student development.

  1. New Standard 303(c) requires that a law school shall provide education on cross-cultural competency, equal access, and the elimination of bias, discrimination, and racism at the start of the program of legal education and at least once again before graduation.
  2. New Interpretation 303-6 states that these same values should be included in the Professional Responsibility course.
  3. Since the definition of “professional identity” in Interpretation 303-5 focuses on what it means to be a lawyer and the special obligations lawyers have to their clients and society, and the Interpretation also provides that professional identity development should involve an intentional exploration of the values of the profession, it seems reasonable that the values of cross-cultural competency, equal access, and the elimination of bias, discrimination, and racism should be included in the developmental sequence of opportunities for reflection and growth over time so that each student explores and internalizes them. Again, this developmental sequence of opportunities to foster each student’s professional identity requires coordination and progression among the modules.

It may be that the common committee structure for law school faculties will not be effective to foster this type of change in the curriculum. Curriculum Committees, in my experience, are responsive to proposals for individual courses, and are not generally pro-active in generating coordinated modules across the curriculum. A Curriculum Reform Task Force might contribute initially to this type of coordination, but again, my experience is that the reports of this type of task force end up in a type of “graveyard” with other past curriculum reform task force reports. The type of coordinated change envisioned here is going to take ten to twenty years – one small step at a time. I think the most effective answer is a pro-active Coordinated Standard 303 Modules Committee with membership from all the staff and faculty functions that affect student professional identity formation.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, then please contact me at NWHAMILTON@stthomas.edu.

Neil Hamilton is the Holloran Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota.

October 20, 2022 by
Christopher Corts

Better Conversations? Let’s Talk About It. (Part 2)

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

Hello, again, readers! Today I am writing the second of a two-part series devoted to the art of facilitating better conversations about controversial topics. When we convene these kinds of conversations, we need to be especially attentive to the possibility that some number of listeners are likely to hear perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and values that are in tension with, and sometimes oppositional to, their own—and that some speakers will need to feel comfortable uttering those kinds of polarizing comments, too.

Last month, in Part I, I explained why I think new ABA Standards 303(b) and (c) present an important opportunity for law schools to have some hard but necessary public conversations about racism, bias, and inter-cultural competency. I suggested 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 will necessarily need to help students learn how to detect, address, and overcome the pernicious effects of racism and bias [Standard 303(c)] in our own profession. And: in our own institutions, which collectively help to constitute the state of “the profession” that we are all obligated to critically assess, strengthen, and reform.

All of this means that we will need to facilitate a different kind of conversation within our communities—one that does not involve debating, arguing, or problem-solving. We need conversations that can help to clear the air, establish the state of things as they are (and not as we hope or wish them to be), and give public voice to important, deeply held viewpoints that some stakeholders might be reluctant to share, especially if they perceive those viewpoints to be at odds with official messaging or apparently-prevailing sentiments within the group.

When I facilitate these kinds of hard conversations, I have four primary, process-oriented goals in view (which, astute readers will notice, could also be read as value statements):

  • give every person an opportunity to speak about a given subject (or: to decline to speak on that subject);
  • elicit candid and forthright comments about things that are most meaningful to the speaker, especially the kinds of statements about deeply-held personal perceptions, opinions, values, and convictions that are at odds with official messaging or prevailing opinions in a group (which may not ordinarily be heard in public, community-wide conversations that are efficiently managed to meet the aims of organizers running an agenda that they set);
  • strive—with curiosity, compassion, and non-attachment to any particular outcome—to discover the full, true range of views that constitute the community as it just-is;
  • create opportunities to be together as a community through periods of shared silence (rather than defaulting to treating silence as something to be feared, avoided, or filled with noise).

All of this takes a lot of time to do well. Without giving adequate time, we cannot hope to let everyone speak, cannot build trust within the group, cannot elicit comments about the deepest and most meaningful things, cannot fully hear and appreciate the true state of things, especially when the true state of things includes profound, meaningful disagreements.

Today, in Part II, I want to give some concrete suggestions for how to plan, stage, and facilitate these kinds of public conversations to achieve the goals outlined above. We need rules and norms to keep everyone invested in the same process. And to do that we need tools and techniques to help us make these conversations slower, less reactive, more intentional, more inclusive, and personally-meaningful to each individual present.

Birthed in my own experiences with inter-faith and ecumenical dialogues while completing my seminary education prior to law school, the suggestions that follow have been refined and further developed during my past decade in legal education and service to the broader community that goes with it. These suggestions reflect communication principles and practical techniques that will be familiar to anyone who has ever experienced non-violent communication, mindful communication…or a Quaker meeting.

Whenever I approach these kinds of difficult conversations, my aim is to try and find a way to facilitate mutual compassion, respect, and trust among participants. Trust makes broader participation more likely, and it makes deeper participation more likely, too. In my experience, when trust exists, it can improve the quality of conversation by improving the likelihood that candid, authentic, contrarian points of view will be voiced—and heard.

Here are a few ideas for how you might facilitate these conversations in a more inclusive and meaningful way. In addition to increasing the likelihood of quality participation from the greatest number of participants (as speakers and listeners), the rules in this list are designed to improve access to the conversation by (a) reducing the costs of speaking for socially-anxious and marginalized participants, while also (b) reducing the possibility that socially-confident participants will be able to grandstand or dominate the discourse.

  1. Consult with experts. The suggestions I am offering are process-oriented. But, especially when it comes to matters of racism, bias, and inter-cultural difference, in the interest of pursuing institutional-level policy reforms—as we must—we all benefit from expert help. There can be no substitute for the wisdom and guidance of experts who have dedicated their professional lives to helping institutions address and fix the wide range of complex problems caused by bias, racism, and a lack of inter-cultural fluency in our organizations.And, at the individual level, we can all benefit from consulting books written by experts. I recommend Rhonda Magee (a lawyer and law professor) and Ruth King (founder of the Mindful of Race Institute, LLC). Both are well-published and write in an accessible way that is especially helpful for deftly navigating the intersection of mindful communication and race in a way that invites maximum participation and deep, compassionate engagement.
  2. Facilitate small group conversations. Public conversations that elicit maximum participation and candor are not possible in mass groups. The smaller the group, the more questions that can be asked and the more topics that can be covered in the same amount of time.How small do the groups need to be? In my experience, six to eight is optimal (for reasons that I hope will become more obvious as you keep reading). Ten to twelve is doable. More than twelve will severely undercut your ability to realistically include all speakers and invite them to contribute with depth and authenticity. This takes many facilitators for many groups, potentially, but one organizing facilitator can come up with the question prompts and guidelines for all of the groups to use and then just leave it to a number of volunteer facilitators to implement at the small-group level. If they can read and follow directions, then they can facilitate.
  3. Seat each small group in a circle. Staging matters. When you facilitate a hard conversation, you have the ability to stage it in a way that can make participation easier—or more burdensome. By creating a circle for conversation, you can help speakers speak and listeners hear.This is not just about achieving a certain form; it is more than just staging and optics. It is also a show of values. And it enhances superior functioning in the group. Sitting in a circle eliminates hierarchies that exist when a podium, stage, microphone, or another arrangement that confers a superior position to one person (the speaker, usually) distinct from all others. In a circle, everyone is seated side-by-side. There is no privileged place for the facilitator, no privileged place for any speaker. There is no person drawing focus in the center of the circle, and no person is (literally or figuratively) outside of the circle. Everyone can see everyone else as an equal within the same circle of concern.
  4. Create rules that make candid participation possible for the most people. To achieve maximum participation, we need to create conditions that make it more likely that everyone, wherever they sit, will feel comfortable offering statements of deeply-held conviction, personal experience, and subjective perception. Some people may be more inclined to do this than others by nature, culture, or socialization, but we want to make it easier for everyone to feel safe bringing hidden things to light—especially sincere statements of personal perception, value, opinion, or belief.Setting rules for equitable, inclusive discourse from the outset of your conversation can help. I will reserve a future blog post to explore the fine art of crafting a beautiful reflection question. But for now, the basic idea is that you want to create questions that are open-ended enough to elicit feedback that is most meaningful to each speaker, but targeted enough to elicit the kinds of hidden opinions and contrarian points of view that you, as facilitator, have designed this conversation to expose.At a minimum, you need rules about speaking and listening that can (1) establish confidentiality, (2) prevent interruption and cross-talk, (3) prevent a small number of participants from dominating the discourse, (4) prevent certain other participants from hiding or refraining from speaking (when they would be willing to do so, given the chance), (5) create a clear order of conversation that each participant can follow, (6) encourage speakers to speak freely and respectfully, (7) encourage listeners to hear charitably, and (8) invite everyone to strive for respectful, compassionate conversation that you can collectively (as a group) define for one another.[In my next blog post, I will give more detail about specific rules you can institute to make the achievement of these goals more likely. These rules are good rules for all kinds of public conversations you might convene in the ordinary day-to-day life of teaching or leading organizations. But they are especially helpful for achieving the goals of hard conversations as we have defined them in this series.]
  5. From start to finish—in your heart, and in your public expressions—keep seeking and valuing contrarian statements of difference and disagreement. This one might be counter-intuitive. There is a strong bias that pervades professional contexts in favor of being positive, constructive, and helpful. But if we are to successfully convene and facilitate a public conversation where the broadest number of people speak and hear the rawest, truest, most polarizing, controversial, and divisive opinions, we need to expect, accept, and normalize expressions of disagreement. Even better? We need to welcome We cannot bring divisions to light and begin a process of growth, healing, repair, and restoration unless we do. Dissent is by its nature disruptive; expressions of it always slow down the ability of the majority to get stuff done, and it always threatens to impede the ability of the majority to get everything they want. In a public conversation, we need to take special care to successfully welcome (and keep welcoming) dissenting viewpoints.As facilitator, by (a) helping to establish shared rules, norms, and values at the outset of the conversation and then (b) posing open-ended questions prompts that are designed to elicit frank feedback on targeted topics, you have tremendous power to help set the social-cultural conditions that are necessary for individuals to speak, hear, and hold disagreement about the things that matter most.It is possible—perhaps likely—that you will be trying to normalize dissent within the context of a community that, in the day-to-day order of things, does not always do a great job of seeking, hearing, and holding dissent? Whatever intended by officials in a community, or by the prevailing majority on a given issue, in practice, the expression of dissent can be impliedly vilified as an enemy of progress. Dissent upsets people. It slows things down. It frustrates decision-making. It destabilizes things. It hurts feelings. And, if we are not extra careful, dissenters can feel as if they are being vilified as enemies of progress…unless we figure out how to sincerely welcome and bless them in our circle of discourse.I think this concern for dissenters is especially important as “well-being” rhetoric becomes increasingly mainstream in law schools (and other legal environments). There are dissenters, laggards, and resisters to that movement, and—for a variety of very important reasons—they might not wish to perform mental health, positivity, or happiness in public spaces. As we try to create a “culture of well-being”, we may unwittingly coerce some into performing positivity in public spaces. These dynamics are at play whenever we try to have a hard conversation across deeply-held differences within a community of common concern.

So: what is the solution? Well, against the noble-seeming bias toward positivity and agreement, we can lead by example.

  • Use your power as facilitator to model the courageous, vulnerable behavior you seek to elicit. You do not need to pretend to be neutral. You can do more than strive to be positive/affirming; or, to put it another way: you can use your positivity and affirmation to welcome, endorse, and affirm dissent. Actively look for opportunities to express your own statements of dissent, difference, disagreement, criticism, objection, or resistance. Don’t be afraid to express negativity, skepticism, or pessimism about something. And, when you do, do it without apology. You can thus model the important truth: those kinds of statements are not a problem, and bringing them to light is one of the most important reasons for having this kind of conversation.
  • After someone expresses a criticism or a contrarian view, sincerely thank them for the comment. With curiosity, ask a follow-up question that doesn’t challenge their view (or a premise upon which it is based); instead, use your follow-up question to give the speaker an opportunity to further develop and voice that same line of thinking. With sincerity, ask questions designed to help yourself and other listeners try to better understand that dissenting point of view with more precision and detail.
  • As facilitator, take care to monitor and enforce the rules of conversation established by the group in unbiased ways. Those rules are in place to ensure that all speakers have the opportunity to express dissenting opinions in the clear, without being countered, corrected, interrupted, debated, disputed, or otherwise managed or controlled. You might be tempted to suspend the rules in order to “handle” or “manage” a certain kind of rogue message that threatens harm to institutional goals. Resist the urge to shut-down dangerous, disruptive comments (which can be distinguished from other kinds of harmful, violent comments that are directed towards individual persons; those kinds of comments can fairly be rebuffed without running afoul of your goal to encourage good faith dissent, criticism, disagreement, etc. in a non-personal, non-violent way).
  • As facilitator, you also have power to create question prompts that are designed to elicit criticism, dissent, or disagreement in indirect, less burdensome ways for your listeners and speakers.For example: you could invite speakers to imagine themselves as having absolute power to take action and fix something in the community—and then ask them to describe the change they would make, and why. Like this:If you had absolute, unilateral, god-like power to take action and change one thing about the way this law school handles [insert controversial topic that you hope to learn about]—what would it be? Why is making that change so important to you? How do you imagine the law school community would be better after you made that change? What would it look like?Notice: by identifying the thing that most needs to change, you are likely to find out about something that angers/frustrates/demoralizes the speaker, something the speaker wants to change. And you are able to discover the speaker’s preferred solution to the problem, including their reason for the solution. And you will help everyone catch a glimpse of the way the reformed world would look like, from the speaker’s perspective, once that thing the speaker wants to change gets fixed.In my experience, this question can elicit some surprising, thoughtful, deeply-felt responses. This kind of question can be applied to many different topics, and refined so that it is posed in a broad or narrow way.There are many other ways to directly or indirectly ask questions that can get people talking about things that, if not actively sought-out, would just remain hidden. Have courage! Get creative. See if you can find an easier way for someone to bring something they might ordinarily keep hidden to light.
  1. End with silence. When I facilitate, I like to close a hard conversation by leading everyone in a minute or two of silence. It creates a sense of ritual. It creates an ending. It gives space for everyone’s brain to transition away from the rigor of dialogue to whatever comes next. It also reinforces the value of slowness, which has permeated every aspect of the conversation circle.Sometimes, I make the silence symbolic. For example: I might tell everyone that we are going to observe the silence as a way of bringing our collective attention to the reality that, for all that has been shared today, there remains a number of true and meaningful things that have yet to be articulated. Silence helps us hold those mysteries in our collective consciousness.Or: I might invite everyone to sit together for two minutes in silence to show that, despite all of the differences expressed today, the silence we share is still big enough to hold us together in unity—despite whatever differences or disagreements we voiced and heard.Or: I might say that we will observe the silence by filling it with thoughts of gratitude for contributions made—by showing up, by speaking, by hearing, by caring.Or: I might say that we are observing the silence as a way of respecting the mystery of human existence. Like the ties that bind a community, the silence between us is fragile. And, like silence, the gift of community can be easily, thoughtlessly broken if we do not take care, give our attention to it, and hold it in our concern.Or: I might say nothing. I just invite people to sit silently together for a minute (or two). And leave it to each individual to figure out how to live in their minds during that period.

We need to normalize silence as an important part of public conversations. Silence gives time to think, breathe, reflect, pray, seethe, ruminate, calm yourself, meditate, daydream, whatever. If we let it? It can speak to us. It can draw us into an experience of transcendence or mystery. It can be symbolic of the unknown, unspeakable, yet-undiscovered truths that help to define a community as surely as voiced commitments or grievances do. Silence is not something to fear, avoid, manage, or fill with noise. It is a blessing—part of what just-is—and it ought to be welcomed, with purpose, into our conversations. No shame or apology necessary.

So there you have it: six simple tips for facilitating public conversations that are explicitly designed to bring deeply personal, possibly-controversial opinions to light. Whenever I am privileged to facilitate conversations like these, my deepest hope is that every attendee will be able to head for the exit thinking something like: “I appreciate that I finally had the opportunity to speak from my heart. And I appreciate the opportunity to hear others speak from theirs.” I also hope they will be able to leave the circle saying something like, “Well, no one can accuse that of being an echo chamber!”

All of this might be exhausting, but it is nowhere near exhaustive of all that might yet be done. If you have any ideas, thoughts, concerns, or wisdom that you would like to share on the topic of facilitating hard conversations, please do not hesitate to email me at ccorts@richmond.edu. I would love to hear from you!

Christopher Corts, Contributor

October 11, 2022 by
Sarah Beznoska

Leveraging Staff Departments in Professional Identity Implementation Efforts

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

It’s a regular day in the Office of Student and Career Services at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. My day starts by meeting with a second-year student who is in tears because they did not receive any offers from our recent on-campus interview program. After reminding them that on-campus interviews are a very small segment of the legal market, I ask more questions than I answer: why they applied to the large law firms participating in on-campus interviews? Whether it is consistent with the conversations we had last year? What is their interest, if any, in public service? How they felt during the interviews? And what next steps they might take that are consistent with their strengths and values?

At noon, I moderate a panel discussion of site supervisors from our externship program, who talk about the learning opportunities available through the program. We focus on the skills that students develop on-site and the ways that the opportunities prepare students for employment goals. Throughout the program, I remind students about the deadlines for the program’s application process, noting that I understand they are busy, but I won’t waive the deadlines. If they are having trouble meeting deadlines, which is an essential lawyering skill, they can meet with a member of my team to talk about calendaring and time management.

After the panel, while eating lunch, I review a student’s cover letter for a new law clerk role. Knowing from conversations with the student that they have a lot more relevant experience than the cover letter demonstrates, I pull up their LinkedIn profile and send along some reflective questions to get them thinking about how they can leverage their past experience, even the non-legal experience, to demonstrate to this employer that they can do the work.

In the late afternoon, I meet with several first-year students, who are required to have an initial meeting with my office before the end of the semester. We cover everything from what brought them to law school to what experiences they have enjoyed most during their first semester to what steps they should be thinking about moving forward. We talk about graduation requirements, summer internships, and managing student debt, before I send them away with a Winter Break to-do list to advance their professional development.

As the day ends, I have a conversation with one of our third-year students, who has had a negative experience with a colleague in a student organization. We brainstorm some ways to address the issue, while remaining professional and consistent with their own values as a person. We also talk about taking some time for self-care and connecting with their personal support network to help process some strong emotions about the experience.

I close the day with an email from a recent graduate who has landed their first long-term post-graduate job. I congratulate them on success in what I know has been a long process, and I collect the ABA-required information for employment reporting before heading home.

This work—the day-to-day work I do in Student and Career Services, a combined department we launched in 2019 at Cleveland-Marshall—is built on some of the foundational premises of professional identity foundation. On a good day, I like to say that I help students, from day one, to assess and plan their entire law school experience with the goal of employability—coursework, student organizations and leadership, wellness support networks, externships, work experiences, and career outcomes. I meet students where they are at in their personal and professional development, and I talk with them about everything they are doing at the College of Law. Beyond that, I frequently hear about their personal life challenges, their families, their worries, and their successes. I hear students’ stories, I listen to their reflections on the experiences they are having in law school and the legal market, and I encourage them towards action items that move them along toward becoming the lawyers they want to be.

In other words, although we don’t do it all, we do a lot of professional identity formation in my office. In career services, we ask students to do self-assessment of their skills, strengths, and values during the fall semester of their first year. We offer practice area and industry panel presentations to allow students to explore the legal market. We help students to tell their own employability story through cover letters, resumes, and LinkedIn, in language that would resonate with legal employers. We support students on academic advising matters and the process of finding an experiential learning opportunity to fit their goals.

In student services, our focus is on developing responsible student leaders of our student organizations, empowering students to collaborate with their peers on events and programs, and developing wellness initiatives to create a culture of wellness and to help students embrace wellness as a part of their professional development.

It has been nothing but inspiring to see the professional identity formation (PIF) community embrace all of these things, and more, in developing implementation plans for the ABA’s professional identity standard. Inspiring to join a community of like-minded teachers and student-centered supporters, who are focused on helping students to build meaningful experiences towards successful outcomes. Inspiring to hear the creative ways that faculty engage students in PIF-related exercises and have conversations that don’t fit within the space of Student and Career Services. Inspiring to see institutional collaborations happening to benefit students.

So, when collaborating, don’t forget your staff departments! Engaging your talented staff team is as easy as reaching out to them to learn about their programs and offerings for students. Just ask! Build your PIF implementation plan to include Student and Career Services, to increase your employment outcomes for students, and to leverage all of the resources available in your institutions. I promise that your staff will be happy to hear from you!

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

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

 

October 7, 2022 by
Curtis Osceola, Janet Stearns

Celebrating October 10, 2022: Mental Health Day, Indigenous People’s Day, and Professional Identity

By: Janet Stearns, Dean of Students, University of Miami School of Law
Chair, ABA COLAP Law School Committee

World Mental Health Day

October 10 has been declared as World Mental Health Day by the World Health OrganizationThe objective is to “raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and to mobilize efforts in support of mental health.” Just last week, the CDC announced that the suicide rates in the United States increased four percent from 2020 to 2021, showing that the demand for resources and education remains great.

For many years, the ABA Law Student Division and the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs have partnered to bring Mental Health Day to our law students nationwide. While initially organized in March, the groups now celebrate October 10 as Law Student Mental Health Awareness. The ABA will partner to feature national programming to bring attention to law student mental health and reduce stigma so that resources are accessed. Many law schools will use Mental Health Day as a linchpin for law school wellness days or wellness weeks. Often, lawyer assistance programs around the country also use this opportunity to visit area law schools or do outreach through social media. I expect that many of the readers of this article are already on the path to organizing programming for the upcoming Mental Health Day. However, an excellent review of the range of opportunities is covered by Jordana Alter Confino in her 2019 article Where Are We on the Path to Law Student Well-Being?: Report on the COLAP Law School Assistance Committee Law School Wellness Survey.

The 2022 Mental Health Day is just around the corner. This year, at the request of the ABA Law Student Division leadership, we have recruited a group of thought leaders on well-being (among them bar leaders, law faculty, COLAP members, and law students) to record short videos sharing messages on well-being. An intensive social media campaign will continue over the next two weeks. In addition, on Friday, October 14, a number of law students, representing diverse initiatives around mental health, well-being, and mindfulness, will convene to discuss a number of topics in law schools and advocate for change. (Please contact the author for additional information if you have students who should be added to this invitation.) We anticipate that many law schools will be hosting their own programming, and encourage all to share your activities using #LawStudentWellBeing.

While this initiative predates the recent revisions to the ABA Standards, this is an opportunity to underscore that the ABA COLAP and Law Student Division advocated jointly for the inclusion of well-being in the Standards for many years. This year, now that ALL law schools must make resources available around well-being under Section 508, we expect that 2022 Mental Health Day will truly be a national event.

Indigenous People’s Day

Monday, October 10 coincides with the holiday now known as Indigenous People’s Day. Some history on this holiday: in 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first designated October 12 as Columbus Day, commemorating the day when presumably a crew member of the ship lead by Columbus “sighted land.”  Since 1971, this was recognized as a federal holiday, and then moved “officially” to the second Monday in October.

South Dakota was the first state to recognize Indigenous People’s Day in 1990, and since then a number of states have followed. While it is not yet a federal holiday, a movement is growing. In 2021, President Biden was the first U.S. President to issue a proclamation in recognition of Indigenous People’s Day.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, our Nation celebrates the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples, recognizes their inherent sovereignty, and commits to honoring the Federal Government’s trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations….On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we honor America’s first inhabitants and the Tribal Nations that continue to thrive today.

Early in the planning for this year’s Mental Health Day, the organizers recognized that the coinciding of the two holidays provided a great opportunity for reflection and awareness. For one, we recognized that some law schools may be closed on Monday, October 10 and that we needed to be flexible with programming that would extend over the entire week. Further, in recruiting thought leaders for this year’s videos, we actively sought voices that would help us highlight the significance of the two overlapping dates. We invite you to pay particular attention to the contributions of Professor Rhonda Magee (University of San Francisco), and Siena Kalina, 3L at Colorado/ Boulder and President of the National Native American Law Students Association.  We are grateful for their contributions.

The Intersection of Mental Health Day and Indigenous People’s Day: Lessons for  Professional Identity Education

The significant changes in the ABA Standards in 2022 have created many opportunities in legal education.  Among these is the opportunity to create new dialogue between the advocates for law student well-being and supporters of education addressing bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism. These two issues are closely intertwined on many levels, and we have a unique opportunity in the upcoming weeks to reflect and message on this.

In 2020, Mental Health Day featured the path-breaking work of Rhonda Magee and her book The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness. The recording of her presentation is still available on the ABA website. Professor Magee’s powerful work speaks to the role of mindfulness in our own lives and as an integral part of racial justice work.

In recent years, I have also become more attuned to the need for programming that speak directly to some of our students who may feel marginalized in our law schools. I wrote about this in the AALS Student Services Section Newsletter last year, exploring the integration of well-being and anti-racism programming.

As I have been pondering for myself the upcoming holidays, let me suggest a few very concrete but important steps towards well-being for our Native American Law Students:

  • Miami University and other institutions are using land acknowledgements to reframe our understanding of property and show respect for local indigenous peoples. My institution now has such a land acknowledgement on its Consider special messaging that should be shared for Indigenous People’s Day.
  • Read about the National Native American Law Students Association and whether your law school does or should have representation.
  • Reach out to graduates who may be able to teach and share wisdom…with us and with our students. I made such a call last week to a wonderful former student, Curtis Osceola, who now works as Chief of Staff to the Miccosukee Indian Tribe here in
    South Florida. I have asked him to write a short message to be shared with Miami Law next week in recognition of Indigenous People’s Day. You can read his powerful message, which appears at the end of this post.

    Janet Stearns is Dean of Students at the University of Miami School of Law and Chair of the ABA COLAP Law School Committee.

  • Recognize that all of the Mental Health and Well-Being challenges that we are highlighting are playing out in significant ways in the Indigenous community, and often with far fewer resources to support.

The author welcomes hearing from colleagues across the country as we all explore approaches to our commemoration of the dual holidays that will take place October 10, 2022. You can reach me at jstearns@law.miami.edu.

Curtis Osceola’s Reflection Re: Indigenous People’s Day

Columbus Day. I remember when I was a child sitting in an elementary school classroom and being told of the exploits of Columbus. How he traveled the world, explored the Caribbean, discovered America…

I raised my hand, “Miss, Columbus didn’t discover America, my people were here.” The teacher was taken aback. I doubt anyone had ever challenged the lesson plan, “Yes he did, Curtis. Columbus discovered America.” She replied. “No, he didn’t, he was lost and my people were here first.” I was sent to the office for insubordination. I felt humiliated, guilty, and stupid. How could I have been so wrong? Is my entire existence wrong? What can I do to be “right?”

Many Natives have expressed the same defiance to colonial history, but now that defiance has become a movement. The movement to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day was born out of the rejection of the lie that is the “Discovery” story of Columbus. But why such a strong rejection? America is great after all. We have the blessings of freedom and democracy. We are protected by laws and those who enforce those laws. We have courts and modern notions of substantive and procedural due process. So why fight the history?

Because the lie hurts. Not like a cut with a knife or a bullet through the flesh. It hurts the mind. Take, for instance, a Native child today. How many Natives before them endured racism, oppression, violence? What effect did those experiences have on the mental health of their predecessors? On their brain chemistry? What is the net effect of that experience through their progeny? The generational trauma of war, removal, and extermination have evolved into contemporary mental health issues like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and suicide. These are exacerbated by the social ills of poverty, unemployment, disenfranchisement, domestic violence, and constant bereavement.

Take the experience described earlier: Imagine if a young family member told their teacher about the history of their family member told their teacher about the history of their family, of their heritage. Imagine if the teacher said to that child that they were mistaken, that the history they learned from their family, your ancestors, was wrong. Imagine that child being punished for their expression of truth. And think for a moment—if that single incident was foundational for the formation of my personality and identity, then what further effect does the cumulative trauma mentioned earlier have on the mind?

This is a small window into the intersectionality between what is now Indigenous Peoples’ Day and World Mental Health Day. It is serendipitous that this year they both fall on October 10, 2022. Native Americans now celebrate the second Monday of October as one that is representative of their heritage, legacy, and identity. It seems that the healing has begun. Indigenous People have been subjugated and oppressed since the dawn of the New World. You can help make positive change for Indigenous people. It may not be easy, but it’s worth trying.

Curtis Osceola is an alum of Miami School of Law and now works as Chief of Staff to the Miccosukee Indian Tribe in South Florida.

So how can you make a difference? Make it personal. Become aware of the Indigenous people in your community. Ask them about their land, their history, their experiences. Empathize (or even sympathize) with them. We are the real legacy of the land—subject to the original sins of the American experiment. Remember that the experience of Indigenous people is not just a social experience, but a psychological one as well. Be a friend, be an advocate, be insubordinate avant-garde.

October 5, 2022 by
Jabeen Adawi

Clinical Pedagogy: Paving the Way for Professional Identity Formation

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

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

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

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

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

Internalizing Deep Responsibility to Others

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

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

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

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

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

Developing Major Competencies

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

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

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

Establishing Well-Being Practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 3, 2022 by
Louis Bilionis, Neil Hamilton

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

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

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

September 28, 2022 by
Neil Hamilton

Introduction to the Definition of Professional Identity and the Formation of a Professional Identity

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

This short Holloran Center definition of student professional identity and the formation of a professional identity is the result of a process of inquiry, dialogue within the Center and with others nationally, and reflection since the founding of the Center in 2006. Starting in 2006, the Center focused on synthesizing the core values of the profession from the Preamble to the Model Rules, the three ABA reports and the Conference of Chief Justice Reports on Professionalism, legal scholars’ definitions of professionalism, and our study of how exemplary lawyers defined the core values of the profession.

Providentially, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published Educating Clergy, the first of its empirically-based studies of higher education for the professions in 2006, followed by Educating Lawyers in 2007, Educating Engineers in 2009, and Educating Nurses and Educating Physicians, in 2010. The Carnegie studies introduced “professional identity” and “professional formation” as central to each new entrant’s development in higher education for all of the professions including legal education.

By 2012, we thought that “professional identity” and “professional formation” were more useful than “professionalism” because: (1) they incorporated the same core values; (2) they were terms applicable across higher education for the professions which both increased their fundamental importance and meant that we could learn from higher education in the other professions; and (3) they avoided the narrow understanding of many practicing lawyers that “professionalism” was principally focused on respect for others.

Since 2012, the Center has been in a continuous process of further inquiry, dialogue, and reflection to create a short definition of professional identity and professional identity formation that emphasizes both the two most foundational core values of the legal profession (off of which all the other needed capacities and skills needed to practice law build), and also the journey for students to internalize and demonstrate the two foundational core values. Notably, the two foundational values are emphasized in every major faith tradition and nearly all of the major secular philosophies.

We have a consensus among the two co-directors, the associate director, and the three Holloran Center Fellows, and we offer this Holloran Center short definition of both professional identity and professional identity formation to inform your dialogue and reflection on the Standard 303 revisions.

What Is a Law Student’s Professional Identity and What Is Professional Identity Formation? — A Short Introduction
Holloran Center – September 2022

Generally speaking, professional identity is “a representation of self, achieved in stages over time, during which the characteristics, values, and norms of the … profession are internalized, resulting in an individual thinking, acting, and feeling like a … [member of the profession].”

For law students and lawyers more specifically, we can synthesize a succinct definition of professional identity from the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the four major reports on professionalism from the ABA and the Conference of Chief Justices, and Holloran Center research. For law students and lawyers, professional identity is grounded in two foundational norms and values that law students and lawyers must understand, internalize, and demonstrate:

  1. a deep responsibility and commitment to serving clients, the profession, and the rule of law;
  2. a commitment to pro-active continuous professional development toward excellence at all the competencies needed to serve others well in the profession’s work.

“Professional identity formation” is a developmental process beginning in law school and extending over a career that “should involve an intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.”

Professional identity formation principally involves a process of socialization. The professional-to-be begins as an outsider to the professional community and its ways, values, and norms. Through experiences over time, inside and outside the classroom and the law school, the individual gradually becomes more and more an insider, “moving from a stance of observer on the outside or periphery of the practice through graduated stages toward becoming a skilled participant at the center of the action.”

The process continues throughout one’s career and features “a series of identity transformations that occur primarily during periods of transition” often marked by anxiety, stress, and risk for the developing professional. This process of socialization is a product of the developing lawyer’s social interactions and activities in environments authentic to the legal profession’s culture and enriched by coaching, mentoring, modeling, reflection, and other supportive strategies.

We hope this definition of professional identity and this description of professional identity formation can serve as a useful entry point for a law school’s faculty and staff interested in discussing and reflecting upon professional identity and professional identity formation in the context of the mission of the law school. 

Please click below to view the definition with its endnotes.

Defining Professional Identity and Professional Identity Formation

Neil Hamilton is the Holloran Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota.

 

September 21, 2022 by