Event Profile

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The conference’s overarching goal is to provide clinical educators with concrete lessons, examples, and ideas for improving teaching, student assessment, and clinical program self-evaluation in the face of a changing legal profession and world.  Plenary sessions, mini-plenary sessions, concurrent sessions, and working groups will be structured to emphasize and produce takeaways for improving the teaching of lawyering skills and professional values, incorporating reflection components into externships/field placements and in-house clinical courses, successfully meeting the teaching challenges of today, designing effective student assessment instruments, and engaging in meaningful self-evaluation of clinical programs.

The legal profession and needs of law school graduates have been rapidly changing.  The last five years have brought profound changes in the legal profession, including law firm downsizing, a weak legal employment market, and an increasing call for practice-ready law graduates.  At the same time, the needs of our client communities continue to evolve, as do our students’ goals and expectations for their clinical experience.  These changes have placed, and will continue to place, more demands on clinical legal education within law schools.  This conference will explore what these changes mean for clinical faculty while providing attendees with concrete tools they can use at their home institutions. 

The conference this year will take place over three and one-half days and will address the changing environment by examining three major themes:  (1) setting goals and structuring in-house and externship/field placement clinical courses in an environment in which student goals, client needs, and the profession itself are changing; (2) developing effective techniques for teaching skills, given how the practice of law has evolved and expanded in the 21^st century; and (3) measuring the effectiveness of our teaching by learning from different clinical models (simulations, externships/field placements, and in-house clinics). 

There will be a plenary for each of these major themes, and presenters will include faculty who focus on externships/field placements, in-house clinics, and simulation skills teaching as well as experts from other disciplines.  A subtheme of the conference will be to compare and contrast what occurs in each type of clinical pedagogy and what we can learn from each other as legal educators in our common enterprise to prepare students for the practice of law.