legal education

a law students’ bill of rights?

May 19, 2020 No Comments

I’m involved in a project to create a virtual learning experience for law students this summer. Spurred by the pandemic and its impact on law students’ summer employment opportunities, a group of forward-thinking people came together to ask, how can we help students right now? What can we do, with what we have, where we are?

I’ll be sharing more on the project shortly.

I mention it because the idea of a law students’ bill of rights came up in planning this learning experience. Our group is focused on giving students meaningful interaction with skills existing on the People and Process sides of the Delta Model. Skills that are largely absent from most law school curricula, and frankly don’t appear in many summer employment experiences, either. And, they’re critical to lawyer formation, professional success, and general thriving.

As we considered what we should be offering students, one of our group referenced a (yet to exist) law students’ bill of rights as a way to articulate what students should be getting out of their early formative learning experiences in law. (I use this phrase intentionally, to be broader than just law school.)

What do law students have a right to, from a legal education? And what comprises a legal education?

These feel like important questions to me. I think we’re going to explore them. With law students. Stay tuned.

And, if this is a topic of interest to you, let me know via Twitter.

-CM

legal education, redesign

Legal Education Unmasked?

May 14, 2020 No Comments

Well, fellow legal educators: we did it. We survived a semester that—no, seriously—tried to kill us. We lurched about, frantically learning new rules of physical, social, psychological, even emotional distancing.

We virtually-graduated a class of distracted, traumatized, gritty-resilient students whose futures remain as bright as they are uncertain. If our students were not always engaged? We weren’t either. We all were good faith players in a very confusing improvisational drama.

All over America, law schools flattened their own curve—and watched intrinsic motivation spike. And dive. And evaporate. And flatline. And resurrect. And…pick your own favorite verb. We saw it all.

Learning for learning’s sake made a bit of a comeback. So did phoning it in. (Literally. And figuratively.)

We stared down existential crisis…and won. Without grades or the curve: who are we?! Why do we exist? Do we still matter?

Unclear. But we live to fight, doubt, and pit students against each other for another day.

We found a difference between learning…and the assessment of learning. We proved we could still give meaningful feedback without giving a grade. Even so: growth, learning, and a long journey toward professional competence can flourish without a number or letter grade parasitically attached.

Like world-class athletes, elite musicians, and master craftswomen, we watched wannabe-worldclass lawyers, with wildly-varying levels of resources or motivation, track their growth toward greatness by comparing their own individual performance against…their own previous performance.

As for assessments? We discovered, again, that exams can be given online. Without sharing physical space. Like good canaries in the bar examiners’ coal mine, we wrestled with a different question: do exams need to be given at all? Do our tests even test what we need them to? Might there be another way to do summative assessment with integrity?

And, my favorite question now dawning: is it possible that we could stage legal education as an arena for practice—not competition?

These questions, our fears and doubts, the interventions we risked…it was all gloriously human. Emotional, aspirational, motivated by noble and ignoble impulses, flawed in execution. Some stuff worked, some stuff didn’t. Some of the stuff that never really works suddenly caught our attention, and we finally cared. A lot.

But…big closing question….:

Did we really need a pandemic to see, and feel, and try, and do, and learn, and fail the way we did?

Could we lose the global crisis and still be willing to risk doing things in new and better ways? Can we leave this semester behind and still hold ourselves and each other accountable for doing it better next time?

Iterating on the Delta Model: Practice, Process, People

January 25, 2020 No Comments

We intend the Delta Model for Lawyer Competency to be iterative and agile, meaning we will constantly seek to update and improve as we learn more about lawyer competencies and how best to communicate them through the model.

The latest iteration adopts the labels People, Process, and Practice for the three sides of the Delta. I started using these labels in talking about the Delta and found they both accurately capture the content as well as people’s attention.

Delta Model v.4: descriptors of Practice, Process, People
Image courtesy of Alyson Carrel.

Delta Model v.4: competencies of Practice, Process, People
Image courtesy of Alyson Carrel.

As my fellow working group member Alyson Carrel and I work to improve the Delta Model’s utility, we seek to make it as accessible and useful as possible while also integrating all that we know and are discovering about modern lawyer competencies.

Another step we’re taking is to dig deep into IAAL’s Foundations for Practice initiative and its research into lawyer skills and competencies. By overlaying this research with our own qualitative and quantitative original research, along with the research of others in the legal profession and relevant research on 21st-century skills for knowledge workers generally, we seek to identify the most relevant and desirable skills and build out from here. This enables anyone using the model to start with core competencies and then dig deeper based on individual professional development goals.

We’re currently conducting workshops in law schools and with practicing lawyers, and working with career services in law schools to develop tools and methods for integrating the Delta Model into career planning early on in the process.

As we iterate on these early tool prototypes, we’ll be adding resources to Design Your Delta, where we plan to share with anyone interested in using the Delta Model. Consistent with the original goals of the MacCrate Report’s Statement of Skills and Values for lawyers, we view the Delta Model as highly useful for law students (course and career planning), law schools (curricular planning and development), legal services organizations of all types (hiring, training, and retention), and practicing legal professionals (ongoing learning, professional development, upskilling, and generally thriving).

Most days I feel the seemingly utter futility of this effort — into which Alyson and I are pouring a considerable amount of effort and time — to affect any real change for the better in either how we train new lawyers or how practicing lawyers approach their own professional development.

There is so much room for improvement in both areas and the more time I spend in research and understanding, the more I believe both can benefit immensely from starting with a clearly-articulated understanding of what competencies lawyers actually need in today’s world (and beyond) in order to simultaneously do excellent work and thrive as individual humans.

I’m way over microblog limit so shall return soon to finish up these thoughts. Today, I am optimistic. And impatient.

-CM

legal education, technology

do law schools lag law firms in the integration of technology?

July 8, 2019 No Comments

As I started to respond to this tweet on Twitter, it occurred to me that this is a perfect #ALTJD topic. And it’s been a while since we’ve posted here. So, I’ll respond here, and tweet about it. A twofer.

I have more questions than answers in response to the tweet.

A few questions that come to mind:

What exactly should law schools be teaching, with regards to technology?

Should law schools be leveraging technology pedagogically, i.e. in how we teach?

How can law schools and practitioners collaborate to connect the dots between legal education and practice through technology?

And, some thoughts occur as I ponder these queries. One is that law schools generally don’t much teach the practice of law, but rather legal theory and how to “think like a lawyer.” These are very different things. This seems relevant to the technology inquiry and what role it should (can?) play in legal education.

Another thought: I’m not sure we have enough qualified people to teach technology courses (once we decide what this should look like in the legal education setting). I’ve talked to folks at many schools who want to integrate technology and innovation courses into the curricula and can’t because there are no faculty to teach the courses. Even finding qualified adjunct is proving challenging.

(I have many thoughts on why this is. Starting with the fact that many people most qualified to teach technology and innovation courses aren’t necessarily biglaw lawyers who can afford to spend an enormous amount of time teaching a course for essentially no remuneration. When this is the model, you get a lot of old, white male adjuncts who generally are very traditional. This severely limits the pool.)

And because this is a microblog I’ll save further thoughts for another day.

-CM