Catapult 2013: Tools for a 21st Century Legal Career

When I started the experiment that is the Walters Way, I tried to articulate what might be described as a mission statement.  To be honest, I was initially a bit reluctant to publish any “goals” for fear that I would come across as self-important and/or pious.  And I was worried a bit (still am?) about hostages to fortune.  Anyway, enough about my hang ups.

One of my stated goals at the outset was, and I quote, “to help aspiring lawyers understand the rapidly changing ‘real world’ of legal services and legal practice and the survival skills that are now needed to flourish in that space”.  This was motivated by two concerns that, in my view, have tended to become mutually self-reinforcing (a perfect storm??).

• First, I’m concerned about the structural and economic issues facing law schools and the legal profession.  Too many law graduates chasing too few entry-level law firm jobs. Structural changes in the delivery of legal services. High student debt burdens that may serve to restrict public access to legal services.  I’m sure everyone is familiar with the conventional wisdom on all this but for a useful recent synthesis of said conventional wisdom, try this March 2013 report from the Illinois State Bar Association.

• Second, I’m concerned that the lived realities of law school, the law and the legal profession can break the spirit of passionate, purposeful and idealistic young people who set out with high aspirations to a fulfilling career that adds to the sum of human good.  There is a danger, as one of my former students recently put it, of “losing your sense of self.”  People in my position need to encourage aspiration but to do so in an informed way.  Facilitate.  Educate.  Help to shape realistic aspirations and futures.  Make people not break people, while effectively managing expectations.  And this means that aspiring lawyers need to be made aware not only of the market realities (and, to be sure, there are some grim realities that cannot be sugar-coated) but also the opportunities.

Happily, there are others who share my goal and who are better equipped than I am to deliver on it.  Last month, Alison Monahan and Lee Burgess of Girl’s Guide to Law School, , Amicus Tutoring, and Law School Toolbox fame, hosted the Catapult 2013 conference in San Francisco.  Catapult 2013’s aim was to help empower its target audience of law students and young attorneys not just to find a job in the legal industry but to exploit emerging opportunities and to create and develop a fulfilling career over the long term.  You can read various detailed accounts of the conference here and sign up to join the Catapult mailing list for information about future events under the Catapult banner.  Like all things Girl’s Guide, a potentially great resource.

Digital natives and legal education

An article by Shailini Jandial George, a Professor of Legal Writing at Suffolk University Law School just caught my eye.  It’s entitled, “Teaching the Smartphone Generation: How Cognitive Science Can Improve Learning in Law School” and you can download it from SSRN here.  Here’s what the abstract says:

“Today’s law student enters law school as a digital native, constantly ‘plugged in’ and accessing information at a moment’s notice, often during class time itself. Yet scholars agree that these students are entering law school with weaker reading and reasoning skills than prior generations, due in large part to the way students multitask through life. This article aims to address the problems caused by the intersection of these two issues by applying cognitive learning theory to the law school environment. Part One examines the characteristics of our current students by describing their skills and learning styles upon arriving at law school. Part Two examines cognitive learning theory insofar as it can inform our teaching andragogy: specifically, how do today’s students learn, how can we help our students learn better, and what effect does their multitasking have on learning? The final section suggests ways for students and educators to better translate the information offered in class into knowledge. Ultimately, this article suggests teaching students about metacognition and effective study techniques while also encouraging professors to design and plan their courses by adopting cognitive learning theories and using more visual aids, visual exercises, and assessments to help students better learn the material.”

I firmly believe that as educators we have to “meet our students where they are” and this belief has motivated me (in middle age) to try to learn about new technologies and social media with a view to bridging an ever increasing generation gap.  I’ve often been heard to remark in law teacher gatherings that the average age of each cohort of students I teach stays roughly the same and yet every year I get older.   Moreover, I am convinced that we need to focus at least as much on how students learn as we do on the content of what we teach if we are to promote effective and useful learning directed towards the achievement of identifiable outcomes and the acquisition of professional competencies.  I therefore buy into the main ideas and arguments that Professor George is advancing.  My one question for the members of the Google Generation is: do you think Professor George’s descriptive claim is accurate?  Do you recognize yourselves in her description of the modern law student “as a [multi-tasking] digital native, constantly ‘plugged in’ and accessing information at a moment’s notice, often during class time itself”?  Or is the truth more nuanced?

I need to know who I’m dealing with.

Five reasons why you should take a bankruptcy law class

I’ve been involved in the teaching and practice of bankruptcy law for twenty years.  The more I teach it and the more I learn, the more I am convinced that every lawyer needs at least a passing familiarity with bankruptcy law and that, for commercial lawyers, a good grounding in bankruptcy law is virtually essential.  Naturally, I’m biased.  But this isn’t just me trying to build student enrolment in my bankruptcy law class at Chicago-Kent or helping to sell the American Bankruptcy Institute’s excellent CLE programme to those of you who are already qualified attorneys.  Here are some of the reasons that lie behind my conviction.

1. Whatever your practice area or speciality you will encounter bankruptcy issues.  You will have clients that go bust.  You will have clients that have other people go bust on them.  A business or individual client faced with foreclosure.  A matrimonial client who needs to know what impact an ex-spouse’s bankruptcy will have on the financial settlement.  A business client whose entire business model depends on intellectual property rights licensed by a corporation that just filed Chapter 11.  When a client comes to you and asks you what are the options, you will need some awareness of bankruptcy issues even if only for the purposes of making an effective referral.

2. It’s a speciality for generalists.   I am often referred to as a “bankruptcy guy” but I try hard to resist being pigeonholed because bankruptcy is, in truth, the last bastion of the generalist.  Bankruptcy touches the whole of life.  Where there’s credit, there’s debt and where there’s debt, there’s a chance that some of the debt will turn out to be unserviceable.  Credit and debt arise in all kinds of contexts.  There’s business debt, there’s consumer debt, there’s sovereign debt, there’s municipal debt.  While in an introductory bankruptcy law class, you will likely only consider business and consumer bankruptcy, this breadth of context cannot fail to increase your awareness of everyday lending transactions and practices ranging from the complex debt financing of many large corporations to straightforward asset-based financing such as auto loans to sub-prime and payday lending.  You’ll also learn about basic accounting, finance and valuation concepts. Moreover, bankruptcy law interacts constantly with other bodies of law.  It affects contracts, property rights and secured transactions and so requires us continuously to revisit foundational legal knowledge and basic principles.  The issues arising out of these interactions between bankruptcy law and other areas of law frequently have high stakes.  For example, if your client’s business model depends entirely on intellectual property rights that the client is permitted to exploit under a license, the legal implications of the licensor’s bankruptcy for the continuance of the license on its current terms will be of more than mere academic interest.  Bankruptcy is therefore far from being a narrow specialism.
3. Bankruptcy law affects the way in which transactions are planned and structured.  There’s a natural tendency for us to think that bankruptcy law only matters once we’re presented with a debtor who has filed for bankruptcy.  But bankruptcy is not just an event that we deal with when it happens.  It’s a risk that transactional lawyers have to worry about.  Another of way of making the same point is to say that transactional lawyers often work in the shadow of bankruptcy law.  To take a simple example, lenders will frequently insist that the borrower provide collateral as a condition of a loan.  A lender who has recourse to collateral is better placed in the event of the borrower’s default and bankruptcy than a lender who has nothing more than a contractual right to repayment.  Transactional lawyers also need to understand the potential impact of the bankruptcy trustee’s avoiding powers on pre-bankruptcy transactions and plan accordingly.  For an illustration, see this discussion that I had with Ken Adams about the drafting of contractual provisions in loan notes aimed at protecting the lender against the risk that the borrower’s repayment of the notes might be clawed back under section 547 of the Bankruptcy Code if the borrower subsequently files for bankruptcy.
4. It’s a great class to learn how to use statutory material to solve problems.  If you don’t like big statutes, then you may need to rethink your career plans.  In bankruptcy law, statutory material is front and centre.  You’ll be parsing complex and challenging statutory language (a transferable skill).  But more importantly, you’ll learn how that language can be used to resolve real problems.
5. Bankruptcy law is rich in important and complex policy questions.  Why do we have a system that allows for forgiveness or restructuring of debt at all?  How best do we strike a balance between the interests of financially troubled debtors and their creditors?  Why should some creditors get more favorably treated than others?  And that’s just scratching the surface.

Go on, sign up!

Simple truths for the end of the semester

I encourage all law students to read this post over at the Law School Academic Support Blog about the importance of not abandoning common sense as the pressure on you increases towards the end of semester.  You’ve no doubt heard it all before but it bears repeating.  Good luck over the next few weeks – and don’t burn the candle at both ends!

Flip the faculty

Over at Law School Café Professor Deborah J. Merritt is ruffling feathers in the world of legal education with a recent post entitled “Core Faculty.”  Here’s a flavour:

“The tenured and tenure-track professors form the core of a law school faculty. At most of our schools, those faculty teach doctrinal courses and seminars; they also devote considerable time to research. Over the years, we have added clinical and legal writing professors to our faculties, but they rarely are part of the core. These writing and clinical professors are paid less, usually lack tenure, and bear fewer expectations for scholarly research…

I would flip this structure. If I were starting a law school, I would hire experienced legal writing and clinical professors as the core tenure-track faculty. At existing schools, I would move as quickly as possible to that structure. Why? The legal writing and clinical professors are the ones who know best how to teach what we claim to teach in law schools: how to think like a lawyer.

Legal writing professors have analyzed the components of thinking like a lawyer, developed the vocabulary for explaining that process to students, and created hundreds of well designed exercises. Where does a student really learn how to analyze and synthesize cases? In a class of 75-120 students, where the professor calls on one student at a time for 150-200 minutes a week, offers little individualized feedback, requires no written product until the final exam, and tests students on issue-spotting during a 3-4 hour exam? Or in a class of 18-20 students, where the professor offers a sequence of assignments designed specifically to teach analysis, synthesis, and other critical reasoning skills; provides frequent individualized feedback; requires several written assignments; and grades students on their ability to produce well reasoned analyses of a problem that requires research, analysis, and synthesis of new cases and statutes?

The traditional law school classroom, with its case method and socratic questioning, is better than pure lecture at teaching critical reasoning. But it is still a woefully inefficient and ineffective process of teaching students how to read cases and statutes, how to synthesize those materials, and how to apply them to the facts of novel problems. During the last thirty years, our legal writing programs have developed at a remarkable rate. They now surpass other first-year courses in their ability to teach critical thinking. If you want a professor who knows how to teach legal analysis to first-year students, and who has studied the pedagogy of teaching those skills, then choose a legal writing professor.

The same is true of clinical professors in the upper level. These professors know how to build on the reasoning skills that students developed in the first year. They don’t greet students with the same casebook/socratic method of instruction. Whatever its merits in the first year, that style offers diminishing returns in the upper level and bears little relationship to how practicing lawyers learn new areas of law….”

Readers of this blog will be well aware of my commitment to (for want of a better way of putting it) “practical” legal education, both in terms of coverage (subject matter that my students have more than a cat in hell’s chance of encountering in practice) and in terms of skills-based outcomes.  I also believe in the kind of balanced legal education eloquently outlined here by Susan Carter Liebel.  So as a “traditional” tenured faculty member myself, albeit something of a British outlier, I don’t take issue with Prof. Merritt’s provocative posting, nor with her advocacy on behalf of my legal writing and clinical colleagues.  However, it would be good to see some acknowledgment of the fact that there are “traditional” / “doctrinal” faculty in law schools who are not wedded to the “traditional law school classroom, with its case method and socratic questioning” and are committed instead to the kind of integrated approach to course design, classroom instruction and student assessment favoured by the Carnegie Foundation’s Report.  What’s needed IMO is an integrated faculty to deliver an integrated curriculum.

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The Walters Way may be a bit quiet during April as Adrian has a busy travel schedule (he has some classes in international bankruptcy law to teach in NYC for starters).  You can keep track of him on twitter at @walters_adrian.

More on networking courtesy of Kevin O’Keefe

Following on from Xiomara Angulo’s recent posts on networking here and here, I want to draw your attention to some other great materials courtesy of Kevin O’Keefe of Lexblog:

1) Kevin’s webinar about networking through the internet. The target audience for the webinar is lawyers and law firms. Even so, it is a great resource on the use of blogs and social media for networking and profile development. Key message: engage the audience!

2) Kevin’s recent post “Networking? Conversations with benefits” on his blog, Real Lawyers Have Blogs. The post links to an article by Bella Rareworld that underscores several of the points made by Xiomara in her posts.

Tyler Coulson’s By Men or By the Earth

After we had endured the Oscars the other weekend, it occurred to us here at the Walters Way that we should establish our own version of the academy awards.  To be sure, the limited prestige and kudos conferred by such an award (a “Walters”???) is hardly likely to be the key that will unlock untold riches for our honoree.  Nonetheless, we will proceed anyway, and to ensure that you don’t tune out at this point, I solemnly promise that our ceremony will be conducted without the assistance of Mr Seth MacFarlane…

There is but one category and the category is: “Adrian’s Favourite Law or Law-Related Book of 2012.”  And in this category (drumroll…) the hands down winner is… (pause while he tries to prise open envelope)…

**By Men or By the Earth by Illinois native, Tyler Coulson**

By Men is a true story stark in its simplicity.   A man (Tyler) went to Law School.  He did very well in Law School.  He secured a much sought after 2L summer internship at a BigLaw firm in Chicago.  A year later he started as an associate attorney in the same BigLaw firm.   Then, in his third year at the firm he quit.

Did he quit to take up a position in another law firm or to hang out a shingle?  No.  Did he quit to pursue some other career?  No.  Not a bit of it.

He quit to take a walk with a rescue dog called Mabel.

A very long walk as it turned out.

Between March and November of 2011, Tyler and Mabel walked all the way across America.  Yep, that’s right, they walked from the Atlantic coast of Delaware to the Pacific Coast of California.   As Tyler’s Twitter profile used to say: “I was born.  Then I was an attorney.  Then I quit to walk across America with my dog, Mabel” (or words to that effect).

When I first heard about the book courtesy of Alison Monahan over at The Girls Guide to Law School I was immediately gripped by the sheer momentousness of the story.  Financially, Tyler could not afford to quit (you won’t be surprised to learn that he has student loans to repay).  But recognizing that he was in danger of losing his soul, he quit anyway.  This is likely to be powerful stuff, I thought.  And so it proved.

In truth, the book tells three interwoven stories.  (1) The story of Tyler’s life as a law student and a BigLaw associate.  (2) The story of the walk, the people whom Tyler and Mabel met on the journey (some warm and generous, some unpleasant, some downright scary) and the very real and frequent dangers they encountered en route to CA (speeding vehicles, terrible weather, rattlesnakes, a bear they came across on a Maryland camping ground etc., etc., — you get the picture).  (3) The story of the walk’s immediate aftermath.  As you might imagine, the dominant story is the account of the walk itself.

There are many lessons we might choose to draw from By Men about life in the legal profession generally and life in the legal profession c.2008-2011 in particular.  We could read it in part as a book about the importance of rethinking how we define success in law school and in the legal job market.  We could read it in part as a book about the realities of law firm culture.  We could read it in part as a book about the problems that certain personality types face working in large law firms (in that respect, it certainly connects with the extensive literature on lawyer unhappiness and its causes, a literature epitomized by works such as Douglas Litowitz’s, The Destruction of Young Lawyers and blogs such as Lawyers with Depression). We can undoubtedly read it as a book that has a great deal to teach us about adaptability, determination, persistence and raw survival.

But in the final analysis, for me, By Men is quite simply an epic story of Homeric proportions.  A tale of a restless man’s search for himself. A flawed hero, his faithful dog, and the whole of life out there on the road.

I tweeted in January that I had not read anything as compelling and moving as By Men in ages. I stand by that assessment.

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Check out Tyler Coulson’s website and blog here. You can follow Tyler on twitter @tyler_coulson.