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Vol. 74, No. 7, July 2001
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 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."
"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
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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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