“Presentation Principles”: Connecting Core Lawyering Skills to a Contemporary Lawyering Framework in the Digital Age

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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One way we try to make the connection between core lawyering skills and those inherent in contemporary practice is to examine what unifies what might otherwise be considered discrete lawyering skills. Because we are so aware of how technology is constantly changing and how lawyers and our students need to adapt to its forms and logics in their practice, familiar issues of how to communicate become more evident to us. Technology, therefore, gives us the opportunity to reexamine long held practices, habits of mind, and approaches to teaching students how to present information to colleagues, supervisors, clients, adversaries, tribunals, and the broader community. Technology also expands lawyers’ palette of presentation possibilities and allows lawyers to utilize those possibilities across many new presentation canvasses. With new presentation choices comes the need to think critically about how to use presentation possibilities appropriately. Presentation is a skill basic to all clinics. In our session, we will focus on “Presentation Principles” that unify how we teach students to effectively perform a wide range of core lawyering skills including drafting, oral presentation, and constructing/executing case theory. In clinical pedagogy, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We will show how a class session provides a place to establish a presentation framework, like our “Presentation Principles”, and how a supervision meeting affords students the opportunity to apply these principles in practice with our guidance and then to reflect on the consequences of the choices made.