Thammasat University students interested in law, education, on-the-job training, and related subjects may find a new free book useful.
Law Student Professional Development and Formation: Bridging Law School, Student, and Employer Goals is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:
The TU Library collection includes a number of books about different aspects of legal education. The authors are Professor Neil W. Hamilton, who teaches law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota, the United States of America (USA) and Professor Louis D. Bilionis, who teaches law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law in Ohio, USA
Their book analyzes the difference between the curriculum taught at law schools and the practical knowledge that young lawyers are expected to have after they have been hired to work in legal firms.
They write:
Law schools currently do an excellent job of helping students to “think like a lawyer,” but empirical data show that clients, legal employers, and the legal system need students to develop a wider range of competencies. This book helps legal educators to understand these competencies and provides practical ways to build them into a law school curriculum. Based on recommendations from the American Bar Association, the American Association of Law Schools, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, it will equip students with the skills they need not only to think but also to act and feel like a lawyer. With this proposed model, students will internalize the need for professional development toward excellence, their responsibility to others, a client-centered approach to problem solving, and strong well-being practices. These four goals constitute a lawyer’s professional identity, and this book empowers legal educators to foster each student’s development of a professional identity that leads to a gratifying career that serves society well. This title is Open Access. Do you believe that “thinking like a lawyer” is an important professional skill, but by no means all that there is to being a lawyer? Do you think that being a professional calls for the development of a wide range of competencies? Do you seek to understand those competencies better? Do you think that being a professional should involve the exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices foundational to successful legal practice? Are you interested in new and effective ways to build these competencies, values, and guiding principles into a law school’s curriculum? Would you like a framework for improving your own law school’s attention to these competencies, guiding principles, and values along with practical suggestions you can consider? Would you like to help better prepare students for gratifying careers that serve society well?
This book is written for law school faculty, staff, and administrators who would like to see their school more effectively help each student to understand, accept, and internalize the following:
- Ownership of continuous professional development toward excellence at the major competencies that clients, employers, and the legal system need;
- a deep responsibility and service orientation to others, especially the client;
- a client-centered problem-solving approach and good judgment that ground each student’s responsibility and service to the client; and
- well-being practices.
These four goals taken together state what it means for an individual to think, act, and feel like a lawyer. They constitute a lawyer’s professional identity.
They also define the foundational learning outcomes of the professional development and formation of law students movement in legal education in the United States. They figure centrally in all that follows in this book. We will speak of them as the four foundational professional development and formation goals – or, for convenience and brevity, the four “PD&F” goals.
If any of these goals are important to you, this book explains how to help your students achieve them. Importantly, this book also explains how you can influence others – the faculty, staff, and administrators at your school; your students; and the legal employers your graduates serve – to adopt these goals and take steps to achieve them. We look first at the benefits from a more effective curriculum on each of the four goals…
Law students, faculty, staff, and administrators want to increase the probabilities of better academic performance, bar passage, and meaningful postgraduation employment for each student. Strong empirical data show that student growth toward later stages of ownership of continuous professional development (as reflected in self-directed/self-regulated learning) enhances student academic performance, and that stronger student academic performance in turn correlates with higher probabilities of bar passage. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives aimed at helping disadvantaged students also benefit substantially from a more effective curriculum… that fosters belonging and provides institutional support to navigate the educational environment and the job market.
To the extent that online learning may provide lower levels of support and guidance to students than in-person classroom education, self-directed/self-regulated learning skills characterized by student skill in planning, managing, and controlling their learning processes become even more important for student performance. Data also show that legal employers and clients greatly value initiative and ownership of continuous professional development; a student who can communicate evidence of later-stage development on self-directed/self-regulated learning will demonstrate strong value to potential
employers… Many law faculty and staff would like to see each law graduate internalize a deep responsibility and service orientation to others, particularly the client.
We also know that a substantial proportion of undergraduate students in the applicant pool are seeking a career with opportunities to be helpful to others and useful to society.
Deep care for the client is the principal foundation for client trust in both the individual lawyer and the profession itself. That deep care essentially entails a fiduciary disposition or fiduciary mindset, using “fiduciary” in the general meaning of founded on trustworthiness. Each law student and new lawyer must learn to internalize a responsibility to put the client’s interests before the lawyer’s self-interest. As Professor Greg Sisk emphasizes in a recent treatise on legal ethics: “When the lawyer protects confidential information and exercises loyal and independent judgment uninfected by conflicting interests or the lawyer’s own self-interest, the lawyer’s responsibilities are distinctly fiduciary in nature. In these matters, the trust of the client is directly at stake.”
The legal profession also holds out other fiduciary mindset values and guiding principles relating to trust in each lawyer. For example, the Preamble of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct states, “[a] lawyer should strive to attain the highest level of skill, to improve the law and the legal profession, and to exemplify the legal profession’s ideals of public service.” It declares, “a lawyer should seek improvement of the law, access to the legal system, the administration of justice and the quality of the service rendered by the legal profession” and emphasizes the following:
A lawyer should be mindful of deficiencies in the administration of justice and of the fact that the poor, and sometimes persons who are not poor, cannot afford adequate legal assistance. Therefore, all lawyers should devote professional time and resources and use civic influence to ensure equal access to our system of justice for all those who because of economic or social barriers cannot afford or secure adequate legal counsel.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)