Let’s Get Together and Feel All Right: Teaching Facilitation Skills in Transactional and Litigation Clinics

Go Back

Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Plaza B

Floor: Lobby Level

Facilitation is a critical skill for all lawyers. Transactional lawyers representing a start-up need to facilitate conversation between the founders of the to-be-formed company; litigators assisting a group of tenants facing eviction need to ensure their clients reach consensus on how to fight their landlord; policy makers need to engage with different constituents to put together legislation. Facilitation gives clients the opportunity to engage in constructive conversations despite differences in opinions, values, or culture, and to build trust between individuals, organizations, and communities. But facilitation skills do not come naturally to many lawyers and can only be learned through experience and practice. In many of our practices, students are asked to facilitate both legal and non-legal issues in client meetings. For example, students may represent a group of immigrants who are seeking to form a worker-owned cooperative together. Students would not only walk the clients through the legal implications of starting the business, but would also need to facilitate conversation amongst the founders on various personal and business issues, including how the founders want to distribute profits and losses, how the founders may want to interact and make decisions, and what may happen when one of the founders wants to leave the organization. This interactive session will explore how to design meetings to encourage full participation and engagement; how to communicate about difficult topics; how to intervene critically and creatively in the case of conflict – while balancing other important factors in the lawyer’s work (including when community organizers are present in meetings, power dynamics, and cross-cultural lawyering).