Instead of graduating lawyers with an understanding that they will continue to learn on the job as associates in big firms or at government posts, the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers initiative recognizes that jobs will require students to be practice-ready from the moment they pass the bar exam. Photo: Wayne Armstrong
The University of Denver is leading a charge that will change the way today’s lawyers are taught to navigate tomorrow’s legal world, battle-testing students while they are still in the classroom and challenging them to think like lawyers instead of law students.
In August, the DU-based Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) launched an initiative with 15 law school partners — including DU’s Sturm College of Law — calling for innovation that bucks years of traditional law school education. Called Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, the initiative is being promoted nationally and provides a platform to encourage law schools to showcase innovative teaching.
Instead of graduating lawyers with an understanding that they will continue to learn on the job as associates in big firms or at government posts, the initiative recognizes that tomorrow’s jobs will require students to be practice-ready from the moment they pass the bar exam.
“Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers leverages the Carnegie model of learning,” says Rebecca Love Kourlis, executive director of IAALS and a former Colorado Supreme Court justice. “Our project provides support for shared learning, innovation, ongoing measurement and collective implementation. We are very excited to launch this project to encourage new ways to train law students and to measure innovation in the years to come.”
Key to the program is a website that provides a forum for educators to exchange ideas and share resources. At its heart, Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers calls for teaching that forces second- and third-year students to put all that casework they’ve been memorizing to work, applying it in classroom exercises that are more like real-world legal practice than theoretical discussion.
William Sullivan, lead author of a 2007 Carnegie Foundation report titled Educating Lawyers, will direct the initiative. Kourlis and Sturm College of Law Dean Martin Katz will serve with Sullivan on the Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers executive committee.
“Our goal is to encourage law schools that are already committed to innovation to share what they know in a structured, collaborative place so that other law professors may discuss and develop new teaching techniques,” Sullivan says.
At DU, Katz has been an advocate of reinventing the law school experience to produce lawyers ready to work from day one.
“We want to help law schools integrate three sets of values, or what the Carnegie Foundation calls ‘apprenticeships,’” Katz says. “They are knowledge, practice and professionalism. We believe this initiative can change how law professors and deans, students and ultimately the legal profession respond to our changing world.”