All lawyering is fraught with setbacks and an inability to meet unreasonable expectations. To prepare students for this reality, clinicians must be intentional in how we prepare the next generation of advocates.
Our students’ ability to successfully advocate for their clients is highly dependent on our effectiveness in teaching them to overcome failure and increase their resilience. Thus, we must purposely examine how we utilize the entire clinical experience to accomplish this goal.
This presentation is a practical conversation designed to engage participants to evaluate their teaching on multiple prongs: seminar class activities, client representation, and clinic design and structure.
Seminar class activities: Seminar class activities are a wonderful opportunity to build foundations and challenge preconceptions in a low-risk environment, away from the traditional law school achievement-based hierarchy. Enter an icebreaker exercise sure to have students seeing themselves in a new, more resilient light: The Failure Resume.
Client representations: Clients may be our best teachers of persevering through trauma and challenges. Clients dealing with significant legal hurdles and adverse/oppressive systems provide a tangible demonstration of resiliency and perseverance. Students naturally learn from these interactions, but their development can be enhanced by clinicians calling special attention to them.
Clinic design and structure: Clinic design supports our lessons on resilience and failure. By grading on improvement, collectively workshopping how to recover from mistakes, and sharing our personal failure experiences, students learn to incorporate a growth mindset into their professional development.
This session features three presenters from transactional clinics that actually use the above experiences and lessons learned to help students develop the resilience toolkit needed in the future. They share proven techniques and success stories while inviting participants to contribute the same.
While the subject will be failure, the session itself will be fun. Success is guaranteed.