Implementing Best Practices and Educating Lawyers
Session 5 Workshops

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 – 9:00-10:15 a.m.

[A] Sneaking Skills and Professionalism into Every Course, Every Discussion, Every Day

Carolyn Dessin, University of Akron School of Law

This workshop will explore techniques for bringing skills and professionalism training into traditional law school courses. The focus will be on various brief ways of encouraging students to think beyond the law they're learning to consider skills issues and professionalism. We'll explore techniques by reading cases from across the curriculum, then doing a range of exercises that can be completed in a minute or two. The goal of the workshop is to encourage participants to believe that they can incorporate skills and professionalism into any course without diminishing coverage.

[B] Creating a General Practice Skills Course: Using Lawyers to Teach the Skills and Values Essential to the Professional Practice of Law

Stephen Gerst and Dave Cole, Phoenix School of Law

This workshop will introduce the GPS (General Practice Skills) course that was designed to insure that students in their third year of law school have the opportunity to learn and practice the skills and values they will need in the professional practice of law. The course is taught by teams of practicing lawyers who teach the skills and values they use in their daily practices. Students must complete skill exercises and resolve client problems in small group law firms, and individually, in seven modules which represent different practice areas. This workshop will deal with issues of course design, student assessment, integration with doctrinal courses, hiring and training of lawyer faculty, and course administration.

[C] Phenomenological Practitioner Research: How to Study Your Students' Problems to Improve Your Teaching

Aїda M. Alaka, Washburn University School of Law

Phenomenological research explores the lived reality of subjective experience and helps investigators identify problems encountered by research subjects in achieving their goals. This type of research can provide insight to instructors who are interested in discovering problems students are experiencing in their courses so that they may improve their teaching practices. After an introduction to phenomenological inquiry, workshop participants will design a plan of phenomenological inquiry, focusing on problems they believe are important in their own classrooms or institutions. Workshop participants will consider how to draft pertinent questions, select appropriate subjects, collect and analyze data, and draw practical conclusions.

[D] Bridging the Gap: Seamlessly Integrating Doctrinal Learning into Skills Courses

Miriam Albert and Elizabeth Glaser, Hofstra Law School

With the increasing emphasis on skills training in legal education, educators (both administrators and faculty) are confronted with significant challenges in integrating doctrinal law into practical skills applications. This session will focus on ways to create overlap and bridge the skills-doctrinal divide; we will learn by doing, just as our students do in our classes. The goal is for participants to take away from the session a new way to think about both teaching doctrinal transactional law, and teaching transactional skills law - hopefully seeing overlaps and synergies, to help erode the divide between these two conceptually linked areas of teaching and offer our students a more real-world-based understanding of the relevant business law concepts.

[E] Exploring the Attorney-Client Dynamic in a 20-minute Counseling Exercise and Reflection

Jerry Organ, University of St. Thomas School of Law

Participants will spend 20 minutes participating in a dual scenario counseling exercise. They will spend one or two minutes reviewing a set of facts (one "attorney" set and a more complete "client" set) and then spend eight minutes engaged in a counseling conversation. At the 10-minute mark, the pairs stop and switch roles and go through the same routine with a different factual scenario. At the 10-minute mark, the counseling session concludes. Professor Organ then will lead a discussion of reflection questions he had his students answer in this exercise and the discussion themes generated by their responses.