Building Better Lawyers

USC Law's SCIP holds workshop at Stanford

USC’s Southern California Innovation Project (SCIP) held a workshop recently on “Building Better Lawyers” at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

The two-day event, sponsored by USC Gould School of Law, was organized by Gillian Hadfield, director of SCIP and a professor of law and economics at USC, and Anthony Kearns, National Risk Manager with the Australian Legal Practitioners’ Liability Committee and a leading expert on whole-of-career legal training to improve lawyer decision making and reduce risk.

The hands-on, problem-solving event was designed to explore the mismatch between how lawyers are currently being trained in law schools and law firms. The workshop brought together leading educators, law firm partners, corporate counsel and professional development experts from the U.S. and Australia.

“We wanted to explore what clients in innovative environments increasingly say they need their lawyers to be able to deliver:  effective business solutions with greater efficiency,” said Hadfield, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study where the sessions were held.

Initial discussions and breakout sessions focused on decomposing ‘great’ practice to identify the components of effective lawyering. Later sessions turned to the task of identifying methods for evaluating lawyers’ performance and effective teaching and training methods that could be implemented in law school, in-firm training programs and executive education to build excellence in the legal profession.

“Our aim was to involve all sides of the legal market in the conversation and to focus on how clients and law firms can move away from the current reliance on credentials and firm prestige to evaluate lawyering and towards the kind of concrete performance assessments that will in turn create the incentives we need to implement more effective teaching and training methods in law,” said Hadfield,

In a key session, general counsel from firms including Apple Computer, Mass Mutual, Chartis, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Kraft, CDW Corp. and USC visiting professor  Bry Danner (formerly GC at Edison International) discussed the problems  they face in getting the kind of  legal services they need from outside firms and how they overcome shortcomings.  

Several emphasized the need for lawyers to participate as team players in finding solutions to business problems, and to abandon approaches rooted in “checklists” to manage legal matters.  Many found that lawyers, once in-house, were able to learn how “not to think like a lawyer” and sought to extend those lessons to outside counsel.  Some indicated they were beginning to experiment with hiring new lawyers directly out of law school in order to train them and encourage high performance.

Discussions about evaluation methods looked at what can – and what cannot – be measured and evaluated in the legal profession. The goal was to discuss evaluation tools to select and develop “better” lawyers. Such metrics and tools can be applied to law school evaluation, hiring, promotion, compensation and retention of lawyers.

“’Competencies’ is the new buzzword in legal services, but we wanted to find out how sophisticated we are in measuring the attainment of competencies in lawyers,” Kearns said.   

Added Hadfield, “One of the things we learned was that there are lots of methods used in other professions and industries to evaluate performance.  In addition to competency assessment methods we also discussed techniques such as 360 reviews, behavioral interviewing, portfolios, and—my own favorite—practical tests that could be conducted during interviews to give candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge, judgment and problem-solving skills.”

Leading educators from law schools, law firms and other fields provided insight into best-practice teaching and training methods for developing competencies in lawyers through “whole of career” education.  

Hadfield discussed her experiences with case-based problem-solving courses using teams, a method she has pioneered at USC in both first-year and upper year Contracts class and helped to implement at Harvard Law School this year in the inaugural problem-solving workshop now required of all first-year Harvard law students.  

Other presentations included Kearns’ use of a ‘flight simulator’ for lawyers to improve decision making in firms, and innovations introduced at Northwestern, Stanford, Indiana, Tennessee, Elon and New Hampshire law schools over the past few years.  Also participating were leading experts in education, Bill Sullivan of the Carnegie Institute and Pam Grossman of Stanford’s School of Education.

“The goal of our project was to drill down into what the work of being a lawyer requires, how we might assess when people are better at delivering legal work and how we might better produce those results through legal education and ongoing career training,” Hadfield said.

The Southern California Innovation project is funded by a $675,000 grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.  

To read stories about the workshop, go to:

http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/05/feedbackplease.html

http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2010/05/building-better-lawyers-conference-.html