To supplement its core
lawyering skills curriculum and to reward outstanding students in legal writing, the Lawyering Skills Institute offers a Certificate in Legal Writing.
For example,
the Lawyering skills curriculum at The John Marshall Law School requires each student to complete one of an array of drafting classes.
Not exact matches
And more on, «Oh, the places [our students will] go,» 15 as volume 21 continues the theme of how to best prepare law students to practice law, Jeremy Francis, Daphne O'Regan, and Ryan Black's article, «Designing Success: Motivating and Measuring Successful 1L Student Engagement in an Optional, Proficiency - Based Program Teaching Grammar and Punctuation,» 16 focuses on the
lawyering skill — using correct grammar and punctuation.17 Responding to a gap between the entering students» grammar and punctuation
skills and how to address those needs, the authors collected data18 in a five - year study of almost 1,500 students, who completed the first - year
curriculum at Michigan State University College of Law, which includes instruction on grammar and punctuation.
Every department offers an exceptionally robust
curriculum of substantive, hands - on learning and «softer» but critical
lawyering skills.
While
lawyers tend to think of pleading as an element of civil procedure in the modern law school
curriculum, pleading in the early nineteenth century was a fundamental legal writing and communication
skill.
46 Maryland's program is an example of an integrated
curriculum that marries
lawyering skills, legal analysis, and, to a lesser but growing degree, professionalism47 from day one of the students» law school career.
In other words, she will cultivate the links between our first - and second - year Global
Lawyering Skills courses; our first - year professional identity and career exploration course (The Legal Profession); our clinics, externships, and capstone experiential courses; and our mock trial and moot court competition teams to ensure that McGeorge students experience an integrated experiential
curriculum.
While it's important for transactional
lawyers to know the law and where to find it, there are a host of other
skills and research resources used by transactional
lawyers that are less visible — or nonexistent — in the law school
curriculum.
This may be due to a perception that the use of technology is exclusively part of STEM
curriculum or a support function, as opposed to a core
lawyering skill.
The Report's central conclusion is that, although traditional legal pedagogy is very effective in certain aspects, it overemphasizes legal theory and underemphasizes practical
skills and professional development.5 By focusing on theory in the abstract setting of the classroom, the Report argues, traditional legal education undermines the ethical foundations of law students and fails to prepare them adequately for actual practice.6 Traditional legal education is effective in teaching students to «think like
lawyers,» but needs significant improvement in teaching them to function as ethical and responsible professionals after law school.7 As I will discuss in greater detail below, in general, the Report recommends «contextualizing» and «humanizing» legal education by integrating clinical and professional responsibility courses into the traditional core
curriculum.8 In this way, students will learn to think like
lawyers in the concrete setting of actual cases and clients.9 The Report refers to pedagogical theories developed in other educational settings and argues that these theories show that teaching legal theory in the context of practice will not only better prepare students to be
lawyers, it will also foster development of a greater and more deeply felt sense of ethical and professional identity.10
-- The Australian Law Reform Commission... urged an Australian
curriculum re-orientation away from the traditional content focus towards
skills and values acquisition and training — towards «what
lawyers need to be able to do [rather than] anchored around outmoded notions of what
lawyers need to know.»
Two recent reports — Best Practices for Legal Education: A Vision and a Road Map, 6 published by the Clinical Legal Education Association (Best Practices) and Educating
Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, 7 published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Carnegie Report)-- advocate that law schools focus more on teaching professionalism,
skills, and ethics and on integrating these topics into the traditional
curriculum.
The law school
curriculum has drawn much attention lately, with last week's Carnegie Foundation report condemning schools for failing to teach future
lawyers practical
skills and Harvard's recent decision to change its first - year courses.
Both the business and litigation areas have developed introductory training
curricula to introduce new
lawyers to essential knowledge and
skills.
Mayer Brown has a robust training and professional development
curriculum for all levels of
lawyers that comprises programs covering such areas as legal and non-legal
skills, business development, networking and marketing, leadership, and business acumen.
In her presentation, «Law Students + Technology = Closing the Justice Gap,» Kaufman discussed ways in which law students are moving beyond traditional
curriculum paradigms, learning «
lawyering skills of the future,» and how those
skills can help the next generation of
lawyers and legal organizations provide access to justice for underserved groups and individuals.
IIT Chicago - Kent College of Law recognizes that legal writing, analysis and research are the most critical
lawyering skills taught in the law school
curriculum and that these
skills can not be taught in a single year.
The task force lists a series of external factors that have driven it to these conclusions, including a rapidly building wave of new law graduates on the horizon, a new emphasis on
skills development in law school
curricula, the dwindling willingness of
lawyers and law firms to participate in the process, and the law society's own practical constraints.