Preventive medicine helps patients stay healthy and capable, so that they will rarely require extensive treatment. Energy planning promotes efficiency and independence. Legal education and research, however, have largely neglected preventive concepts.
Practicing lawyers manage legal risks in many situations: tax planning, estate planning, employment planning, and others. What both the profession and legal education have lacked is a systematic way of thinking about planning apart from the substantive particulars of any one field. Law schools teach “Trial Practice” rather than separate courses on Contracts Trial Practice, Torts Trial Practice, or Estates Trials Practice. The same should be possible for “Planning.”
The “Preventing Legal Problems” program addresses these shortcomings, alerting legal educators to the needs and benefits of bringing planning ideas into the classroom. Speakers will discuss (1) preventive thinking among lawyers; (2) how prevention relates to professional responsibility and emerging structural changes in the legal profession; (3) communication skills associated with preventive practice; (4) samples of how preventive lawyering can be applied to corporate law and governance, health care, and contract law; and (5) obstacles to bringing planning into the classroom and possibilities for surmounting those difficulties.