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April 21, 2007
Simulations redux
I just read Gene's excellent post on simulations, and especially appreciated his listing of resources. Here at Baylor, we have a mandatory third-year Practice Court program that involves no less than nine simulation exercises, with four of them lasting three hours or more. It's hard to imagine a more simulation-driven program.
The benefits of all these simulations are significant. Each is supervised by a tenure-track professor with trial experience. By using simulations, we are able to closely control the process and provide immediate feedback to the students, and track their improvement over time. There simply is no better way to teach and evaluate practice skills, provided that the simulations are as close to possible to real-world experience.
There are trade-offs, of course. Having such an intensive set of simulations in the third year makes it almost impossible to allow those students to engage in clinicals or take many electives. Also, by using tenure-track professors (in fact, two of the three are full professors), a lot of teaching resources are going into the time-consuming evaluations of the simulations. Finally, with any simulation there is a certain amount of artifice that has to be acknowledged, and minimized.
-- Mark Osler
April 21, 2007 | Permalink
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"Having such an intensive set of simulations in the third year makes it almost impossible to allow those students to engage in clinicals or take many electives."
That's a real shame -- is there a reason why this is done in the 3rd year, rather than a choice between 2L or 3L years? Simulation offers a lot more control over what a student will experience, but at the same time, as you note, you lose versimilitude. It would be ideal if students could have both.
"Also, by using tenure-track professors (in fact, two of the three are full professors), a lot of teaching resources are going into the time-consuming evaluations of the simulations."
In the simulation/exercise-based trainings we do for legal aid attorneys, we found the same problem. With a 3:1 or 4:1 teacher:student ratio, these activities are expensive.
I'm hopeful that technology will keep improving our ability to increase teacher leverage, however. The MediaNotes platform and the way Farmer et.al. use it at BYU (getting alumni to provide feedback) strikes me as an important and major first step towards making simulations more possible. Still, BYU does pay its alumni to do this work. Real mentorship is never cheap, which is why it's in such scarce supply in practice as well as in school.
Posted by: Gene Koo | Apr 21, 2007 12:03:16 PM
Our skills training at Campbell is almost all simulation, though we have started a Juvenile Justice Mediation clinic and are planning additional clinical offerings. While simulations offer the advantage of insuring each student encounters a certain set of problems, the interaction with a real client is, as the commerical says, priceless. Our trial skills program is required of all students in the second year and consists of a series of courtroom problems requiring students to direct and cross examine witnesses, deliver openings and closings, offer exhibits, both real and demonstrative, and, of course, oppose other students in each of these endeavors. The course is topped off with a jury trial (1Ls are the jurors) of a criminal case. Alumni volunteer to serve as the trial judge and we video the trial for later review and comment, as well. Our third year offering is a one-year course that takes the student from initial client interview through the briefing and argument of a case before the court of appeals. The students are divided into "law firms" of two students and they draft and file pleadings, conduct discovery, actually take a deposition and get both a video and typed transcript for later use at trial, participate in a mediated settlement conference, prepare a joint pre-trial order, brief and argue motions, try the case to a verdict (2Ls are the jurors), file the notice of appeal, settle the record on appeal, brief and argue the case, and, finally, serve as an appellate judge on a panel for their classmates. The course ends when the panel issues the appellate decision. All pleadings and other papers are filed electronically with the same software used by our Superior Court. The two professors who teach this course act as senior partner, judge, and other repositories of information that may arise during the case. Students recruit others to play the roles of the witnesses and the professors feed the witnesses the information. The lawyers must interview the witness to get their story and prepare their case. We use NITA case files and have permission from NITA to modify the files and distribute the information piece-meal instead of as a traditional mock trial file. We also have permission to add additional facts to the case file. This course allows the student to experience the consequences of various decisions, acts, or omissions made along the way. For example, if the student fails to properly request medical records he goes forward without those records and must suffer the consequences at trial when the evidence of damages is not well supported. If he has failed to think about evidentiary foundation for some document during the pre-trial phase he finds himself stymied at trial when offering the document. By the same token, objections raised, and not raised, at trial become problematic before the court of appeals. We can lecture on the various procedural and substantive rules, but until the student sees them in operation and experiences the consequences of their application, or the failure to apply them, the student really doesn't "know" the rules. Students uniformly praise the course as a lot of work and an invaluable experience. While our third year course is not required, about half the class takes the course and the other half takes a practice oriented course in pre-trial litigation. We think we can add some clinical offerings in addition to these courses to further expand our skills training.
Posted by: W.A. Woodruff | Apr 23, 2007 4:35:39 PM
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