A ccording to the recently published Report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “Educating Lawyers—Preparation for the Profession of Law,” it is time for significant reform in legal education.  This report reinforced what many in the legal academy believe about the traditional curriculum in American law schools:  that law schools have focused too much on teaching students to “think like lawyers” and not enough on applying those thinking skills in the complexity of professional practice or on other critical social skills necessary for effective practitioners. The Carnegie Foundation Report emphasized that law schools should attempt to provide “integrated” learning experiences—a form of education that combines the teaching of legal doctrine, lawyering skills and professional identity.

Students are sometimes surprised that what they learn in law school does not seem to include all the aspects of practicing law.  Most of them want to be lawyers so they can have an impact on people’s lives or serve the needs of business or government—to help people in trouble find a way out or to help make their dreams come true.  But the emphasis of the traditional curriculum does not always appear to do that.  Instead, that training sometimes seems distant from the goal of learning how to talk to clients and other lawyers, understand their problems, and generate and implement useful solutions.

Much traditional teaching is done through the study of appellate opinions, a method that helps students learn analytical skills, legal rules and how they develop, but does little to transform students into apprentice practitioners.  Neither does it convey the richness and complexity of a real case.  Mid-way through their first semester, some students feel overwhelmed and disoriented by the lack of a perceived connection between their expectations and the reality of law school.   Some question whether they should continue.  Others seek that connection by obtaining part-time jobs or getting involved in extracurricular activities to bring a dose of reality to their experience.

Clinical Experiences Have Improved Legal Education

Clinical legal education, which has gained more prominence in American law schools over the last 30 years, addresses the problem of how to bring the practice into the academy.  Through in-house and real client clinics and externships, students gain real practice experience in a wide variety of subject matter and practice settings under the watchful eye of committed and experienced supervisors.

However, until they become universal, clinics and externships cannot completely solve the problems described in the
Carnegie Report.   Clinical programs are relatively expensive to operate, and as a result are typically not available to all students in most law schools.  By necessity, they tend to be fairly limited in their subject matter coverage, and students who don’t have interest in those particular areas often do not participate.  Although there has been a dramatic increase in clinical legal education in recent decades, most schools still provide clinics as elective courses and can only serve a portion of their student bodies.

The CaseArc Program Helps Prepare Students To Be Practitioners

After graduating from law school, most students gradually learn what they need to know to become effective practitioners. Those who enrolled in a clinic or an externship are generally better prepared for practice.  But regardless, the process of developing into an effective practitioner can be haphazard.  Students often have to learn on their own not just the business of law, but how to be professionals.

At Case Western Reserve University School of Law, we have dedicated an outstanding doctrinal faculty who provide a superb traditional legal education.  We also have had an excellent real client in-house clinical program (now known as the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic Center) for over 30 years, as well as several externships.  In the middle 1990’s, however, our clinic advisory committee—consisting of practitioners, educators, judges, social service agency workers and other community activists—questioned how our law school could better prepare our students for the practice demands ahead.  The committee found that even the students who enroll in the clinic or an externship could benefit from more comprehensive preparation for practice.  The solution:  we needed to supply more broad-based practical training earlier in law school.  These discussions eventually led to the adoption of the CaseArc Integrated Lawyering Skills Program.

The CaseArc Program, required for all of our students, trains them in the fundamental skills that all lawyers need to be effective professionals.  Regardless of the practice context or subject matter focus, CaseArc seeks to provide the two overarching skill sets necessary for success:  “legal thinking skills” such as legal analysis, legal research, problem solving, strategic planning and recognizing ethical dilemmas; and “social skills” such as legal writing, interviewing, counseling, negotiation, oral presentation and fact investigation.  The CaseArc program begins with an intensive week-long orientation structured around a simple criminal case.  We address issues of professionalism, have students interview the defendant in the case, review and analyze the relevant law, watch the trial, act as a jury, and hear the appeal all in just a few short days.

The rest of the program develops over the first two years of law school.  Each of the first four semesters, students take one CaseArc course which is integrated with a doctrinal subject.  Each course focuses on different fundamental skills and each builds on previous courses.  By the end of the program students are trained in all of the fundamental skills we have identified.  As a result, we believe our students are better prepared and ready to act as professionals in one of our clinics, externships or labs as well as in their first legal jobs.

CaseArc courses are windows into the way lawyers actually use the law in their work for their clients.  The teaching methodology is a blend of traditional classroom and experiential learning.  The program combines large classes with small group and one-on-one interaction, lecture and discussion with hands-on practice, and legal theory and doctrine with application. We believe that students learn the fundamental lawyering skills best through repeated practice.  Therefore, the program introduces students to these skills at the beginning of law school and provides opportunities to get more practice as their training progresses. Students start out with less demanding situations and move to more complex applications as law school continues.  The most important of these skills—client relations skills, legal analysis and legal writing—receive repeated attention.  All of the training leads to opportunities for students to use their acquired skills in the “reality based” Capstone experiences (electives) later in law school—the real client in-house clinics, externships and labs.

The program relies on team teaching so that our faculty can concentrate on what they do best while providing our students with a holistic approach to learning the law and lawyering skills. We want our students to learn from people with different backgrounds and experience.  Doctrinal teachers focus on legal analysis, theory, policy and the development of the substantive law; lawyering skills teachers (full-time faculty assisted by law librarians and practicing lawyers) concentrate on legal research, analysis and writing and the social skills of interviewing, counseling, negotiating, and oral presentation.

The CaseArc program uses simulations designed to present students with realistic yet controlled experiences to help them develop their competence in the “social process” lawyering skills before they have to represent real clients.  These are the skills that involve people interacting with other people.  They consist primarily of client and witness interviewing, client counseling, negotiation, collaboration and oral presentation in formal, informal, litigation and planning contexts.  These skills are deceptively complex and, as every practitioner knows, extremely important to effective lawyering.  We make use of committed actors to play roles that are carefully designed to present lawyering challenges that will provide excellent vehicles for learning.

First-year students do only segments of an entire exercise, for example, a portion of a client interview.  They then watch their peers do other portions of the exercise and are critiqued as a group by their small group (firm) professors.  Students “learn by doing” and by watching their colleagues perform other segments of the simulation.  In this way, students learn the components of the skill being studied and have the opportunity to practice assigned components.

In subsequent years, students are given more opportunities to practice and perfect these all-important skills.  By the end of their second year, students have practiced doing complete interviews, counseling sessions, negotiations and oral presentations.  Because of this gradual approach to completing the entire exercise, we believe students have learned these skills more thoroughly and with greater understanding.

The Curriculum Integrates Legal Doctrine And Analysis, Lawyering Skills And Professionalism

CaseArc courses (which are experiential in nature) are integrated with or “linked” to a substantive area of law that students are studying at the same time or in which they have interest.  We believe this will enhance the learning of the subject matter and doctrine as well as the particular lawyering skill under consideration because each will be informed by the other, giving added relevance to both.  The design of the program requires that all legal writing problems and simulations arise out of the doctrinal subject with which the CaseArc course is integrated.  Each of the simulations, for example, is closely tied to the students’ writing assignments.  Interviews either lead to research and writing projects, or writing projects lead to the performance of a simulation—perhaps a negotiation or a counseling session.  This integration permits us to develop rich, content-based and life-like situations for students to grapple with in their writing projects and simulations.  It also fosters a deeper understanding of the theory and doctrine of the substantive area.

Both Substantive Learning And Skills Training Can Be Taught Simultaneously

In 2003, after a process of intensive study and collaboration led by our Task Force on Skills and Professionalism, our faculty unanimously adopted the CaseArc program.  The faculty determined that a two-year mandatory program was required to teach fundamental lawyering skills, and that this should be followed by a Capstone program in which students have the opportunity to apply what they have learned in authentic professional settings.  We implemented the program the following fall and graduated our first class in the spring, 2006.

One of the major challenges in garnering support for the program was to engage the faculty in a discussion about the relative importance in the law school curriculum of teaching substantive law and lawyering skills.  This was necessary because the Task Force proposed a mandatory curriculum for all students and, as a result, this would shift the balance between so-called “substance” and training in “skills.”  Not surprisingly, we couldn’t at first agree on the appropriate amount of skills training. However, we did acknowledge that our primary responsibility as a law school is to train professionals who can competently practice law.  We also agreed that in fact, we are all engaged in teaching our students substantive law and lawyering skills, and the differences between the teaching in doctrinal courses versus skills courses relate to emphasis and method more than anything else.  We further agreed that as part of a curriculum to train competent lawyers, both are required.

For example, a traditional doctrinal course (like Contracts or Property) might emphasize how to recognize, formulate, and approach legal issues while also conveying information such as the theory and doctrine of contract law.  Hence, when done well, the lawyering skills being taught might be legal analysis, issue identification, rule synthesis and development, and rule application.  Other skills that might also be taught in such a course (depending upon the instructor’s interests) might include oral advocacy to a court, negotiation with another attorney and counseling of a client.  The traditional doctrinal course typically uses the methods of Socratic dialog, case briefing, and lecture to develop these skills and knowledge.

In contrast, a legal interviewing simulation course, which uses a contract case as the basis for its exercises, might emphasize the skills of determining fact relevance, gathering information and building personal rapport as it teaches the theory and doctrine of breach of contract.  The method used might be to place a student in a lawyering role so she can use her knowledge of contract law to perform a simulated interview with a client to find facts relevant to the breach claim.

Once we viewed the pedagogical issues in this way, the idea of an integrated curriculum made sense.  For example, if our goal is to teach students both the substantive theory and law of contracts as well as how lawyers use that law to draft, negotiate and litigate contract matters, we might best accomplish this by combining the two types of courses, teaching both at the same time.  After all, this is how lawyers learn and apply the law and their skills to serve their clients.

The Program Faces Many Challenges But Integrated Curricula Represent The Future Of Legal Education

Of course, developing the CaseArc program led us to other challenges.   Surprisingly, among these was student acceptance. Although students value a relevant education, they also tend to be fairly conservative about changes to the traditional curriculum.  Some of our students were surprised to learn that such a curriculum was not required at the law schools their friends attended.  They also grumbled about their status as “guinea pigs.”  As a result, we try hard to inform our students about the importance of the skills they are learning and why we are doing it.  As more law schools adopt similar programs in the wake of the recent publication of the Carnegie Foundation Report, our job should get easier.

The cost of the program is also challenging.  We have expanded our full-time faculty to accommodate the increased demand for competent skills teachers.  We also have many practitioners as adjunct professors and actors who help teach lawyering skills in the simulation exercises.  Although these dedicated alumni and others do this important work for minimal stipends, the cumulative cost is substantial.

From a pedagogical point of view, team teaching provides wonderful possibilities and significant advantages, but requires careful coordination and collaboration if it is to be done well.  All team members need to be on “the same page” for a simulation or writing project to achieve its desired goals.

Grading is always a challenge in any law school course.  But the challenges are magnified when different members of the team evaluate different aspects of the course.  These difficulties deepen because the law school uses a grading system requiring that only a certain number of students can be awarded the highest grades.  If one team member is more generous than another, inconsistency and unfairness can result.  It is important to have systems in place to monitor the grading and adjust for any inconsistencies discovered.

Also, as the Carnegie Foundation Report indicates, law schools have been using the same evaluative tools, such as a single essay exam at the end of the course, for many generations to rank students for honors, employment and other purposes. These tools do not provide the necessary feedback for students to improve on the fundamental lawyering skills.  In order to address this problem, we have developed evaluative tools which are designed to give qualitative formative feedback to our students while they can still improve; in other words, they can apply the feedback they receive to their next performance.  In some activities we use a modified pass/no credit form of evaluation to reduce the sense of competition for the highest grades.

Although establishing an integrated curriculum like the CaseArc Integrated Lawyering Skills Program presents many
significant challenges, the rewards for students are substantial.  We believe students who experience an integrated
curriculum are better prepared to enter the world of practice than their peers in a more traditional curriculum.   The clarion call put out by the Carnegie Foundation was long in coming but likely will be heard by law schools around the country.  We are glad to be a part of this movement to improve the training of new lawyers.

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