Clinical instructors often teach creativity without realizing it, or without making it an express educational objective. The goal for this discussion session is to emphasize why there is a need to deliberately teach creative lawyering in clinical programs and to explore different approaches to meeting this objective, including traditional methods such as case rounds and supervision, and contemporary methods such as design thinking activities. While the discussion leaders all teach in transactional clinics, litigation clinicians are encouraged to attend as creativity is ubiquitous to all lawyering.
Participants in this discussion will walk away with: (1) a curiosity to incorporate creative lawyering into their curricula more deliberately; and (2) concrete practices that can be leveraged in the clinical setting to teach these values, including approaches introduced during the session, as well as any new approaches that may be explored during the discussion. The intended audience for this session is new and experienced clinicians who are interested in contributing to this conversation (whether they currently emphasize creative lawyering in their program) and sharing their insights.
This discussion will emphasize creative thinking as a core skill and will present approaches to teaching these values more deliberately. The lessons taught in traditional doctrinal legal courses are often very structured, rules-based, and divorced from inventive thinking. Thus, as clinicians, we have an opportunity (and, perhaps, a duty?), to teach students how to develop creative lawyering skills for their future careers. By engaging participants in traditional and new approaches to teaching creative lawyering, participants will be encouraged to better emphasize these values in their current clinical programs and equipped with tools to explore creative lawyering with students in newer ways.