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    Wisconsin Lawyer
    July 01, 2001

    Wisconsin Lawyer July 2001: Preparing for Practice

     

    Wisconsin Lawyer July 2001

    Vol. 74, No. 7, July 2001

    <Preparing for Practice Page 2: Vital Skills

    Street Smarts

    In talking to attorneys nationwide in her ABA work in legal education, "a concern I hear is that many new lawyers don't have common sense," Yu reports. "They may be brilliant in some ways, but they don't have a sense of street smarts, of how to function in a fast-paced, business-driven environment."


    Photo: G. Steve Jordan "There's been a troubling change in the expectations of both the profession and our students. In addition to providing substantive knowledge, they also want us to provide all the skills training, the ethical training, the values training, and increasingly we're seeing pressure to provide the business and office management training ... [Y]et no one says what we should not be teaching."

    – Howard Eisenberg, dean, Marquette University Law School


    Some would call it common sense or street smarts; to others it's thinking on one's feet or problem-solving skills. Whatever the term people use, it's a quality - or an aggregation of qualities - that readies young lawyers for successfully tackling the real work of lawyering. Legal employers want to hire new associates who can hit the ground running. Legal educators, on the other hand, remind practitioners that law school can only do so much. "I understand the pressures employers feel to have people who can be economically productive from day one," says Ralph Cagle, director of the general practice skills program at the U.W. Law School. "But I don't care how well you train a law student, the most important part of their training happens once they're out in the world."

    One way law schools try to give students a realistic glimpse of the practice world in advance is by integrating both theory and practice into the curriculum - for example, in such courses as trial advocacy or pretrial practice. At the U.W., students engage in simulated casework in the general practice skills course taught by Cagle. And both of Wisconsin's law schools offer a wide array of clinical programs in which students do actual legal work - helping poor people with legal problems, working in district attorneys' offices, interning with judges, and much more.

    In Assessment 2000, U.W. graduates rated their clinicals as excellent experience, and said they gained practical skills. Most surveyed employers, however, reported that students' clinical experiences were only of modest importance in their hiring decisions. Yet, many employers may lack awareness of what clinicals involve, perhaps never having had the experience themselves in law school.

    G. Ahou Soomekh, a 1995 Marquette University Law School graduate and now corporate counsel for a Los Angeles medical company, ranks clinicals as the best part of her law school education. When she started law school, she had no desire to become a practicing attorney. "Attorneys got a bad rap," she notes. "I wanted to learn about the law, but I was going to go into business or international relations, with a law degree in my pocket." At Marquette, she did several clinicals in municipal court defense work, the sports law clinic, and the Social Security Administration - none of which pertain to her work today, but useful nonetheless. "The clinics gave me the opportunity to see I could do something good (in law practice)," Soomekh says. "That made a difference for me. When I graduated, I ended up practicing law, which I hadn't intended to do."

    Clinicals help students pinpoint their likes and dislikes in law, and give them some direction on their career path, points out Meredith Ross, director of the Frank J. Remington Center, an umbrella for several of the clinical programs at the U.W. Law School. For instance, some students come in feeling sure they want to be litigators. "Then they find out they don't like adversarial situations," Ross notes, "or they don't like their clients. So maybe this isn't what they want, after all. That's a good thing to learn now."

    Marcia Facey, a 1998 U.W. graduate, says taking diverse clinicals helped her eliminate practice areas ill-suited to her. Those experiences and a blossoming interest in property law stemming from a class and a summer job helped steer her to her current position as a real estate lawyer in a large Milwaukee firm. None of her clinicals related to her current field, but she's glad she did them. Now that she's in practice, "the main thing is knowing how to communicate," Facey says. "In the clinicals you're dealing with real people. You gain a comfort level in communicating to clients. And that prepares you to get out and continue to develop those skills."

    Preparing for Practice Page 4: Nuts and Bolts>


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