Ethics

Held last week by USC at Stanford, the conference had a lot of energy and vision about developing lawyers in law school and in firms.  The general counsel who attended didn't seem to dislike first year associates so much as they disliked lawyers with no skill sets -- and who can blame them for that?  Some firms, including Australia's Freehills, are doing a lot of innovating on the training side.  DLA and Howrey had some interesting programs going as well.

In the schools, Gillian Hadfield and Bry Danner (USC: contracts and legal profession), Lauren Robel, Bill Henderson, and I (Indiana: Legal Profession), John Alexander (Elon: over-arching program), Ben Barton (Tennessee: clinical) Kimberly Kirkland (Franklin Pierce: Employment Law), and Michael Klausner and Buzz Thompson (Stanford: "Deals" and Environmental Law) discussed their courses, which in general involved immersion in real legal matter or richly described case method, assignments of roles and/or simulations, team work, and problem solving exercises.  That seemed to make the firms and the GCs happy.  Larry Kramer, dean at Stanford, asked a pivotal question -- what are the incentives for schools to change their ways? -- which many thought was the toughest problem to solve.  William Sullivan, of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, spoke quite thoughtfully on the big picture of training lawyers.