COVER STORY l MOVING FORWARD
FACULTY TASK FORCE CHAIRS:
BUILDING ON STRENGTHS
BU Law is constantly evolving its offerings to meet modernday employer needs while carefully maintaining the curricular strengths that have made it a top-tier law school. The School will continue its traditional emphasis on educating students in legal doctrine and guiding them as they develop excellent analytical and critical reasoning skills. “Although the alumni certainly had suggestions about how we might do things better, most of the reaction was, ‘Don’t rush into any huge changes; you’re doing great,’” says Professor of Law Gerry Leonard, who chaired the retreat planning committee. “Most of them felt they’d gotten a really good education at BU and looked back very positively at their experience here.” Indeed, the coexistence of extensive opportunities for experiential learning—including nearly a dozen clinical and countless externship opportunities—alongside coursework in traditional legal analysis, theory, and ethics has long been one of the School’s strengths. And such programs continue to exceed market expectations. For example, the ABA recently instituted a revision to its accreditation standard that requires students to complete at least six credit hours of primarily experiential courses. When BU Law’s task force on Experiential Learning assessed the School’s ability to meet this requirement, the results were gratifying: more than 83 percent of 2014 graduates met or exceeded the proposed standards, and options abound for the remaining students. Additionally, the School’s doctrinal courses increasingly incorporate practical exercises to reinforce students’ understanding of the subject matter. Such integration is key to the law school’s philosophy on experiential education: through practical 6
NAOMI MANN COMPETENCIES
FRED TUNG COMPETENCIES
KATE SILBAUGH COMPETENCIES
exercises, students are being tested to master the substantive law by demonstrating that they understand it. Beginning in January 2015, a new initiative created by the Competencies task force will give first-year students another indepth opportunity to put their doctrinal knowledge into practice. The Lawyering Lab will be an intensive simulation exercise introducing 1Ls to the practical skills involved in negotiating a business transaction. Working in groups, students will spend a week of Intersession immersed in the basics of client counseling, contract negotiation, and writing. “The aim of the Lawyering Lab is to expose students to how the skills they learn in their first-year classes can translate into practice,” says Naomi Mann, who co-chaired the task force. “We are saying to students: you understand the fundamentals of contract law at this point, after taking a doctrinal class; now we’re going to throw you into a simulation where you’re actually negotiating a contract and analyzing a contract. Every student who graduates from BU Law will have the practical experience of having analyzed and written a contract.”
A CONTINUING EVOLUTION
The Lawyering Lab is the most visible initiative in a long-term strategy of expanding the School’s offerings to ensure that all students have opportunities to be exposed to the real-life lawyering skills sought by today’s employers. Client relations, business literacy, and writing are among the other skills BU Law alumni emphasized employers are seeking in new hires. Beginning with the Class of 2017, BU Law will now require all JD students to complete a course entitled Introduction to Business Fundamentals. The series of online, self-paced modules— which cover concepts from accounting to corporate finance—will promote business literacy, reinforce key legal concepts, and better prepare JD students to advise future clients. Additionally, BU Law piloted a three-week business education program for 15 students in August. The program taught core business competencies in finance, business analysis, marketing, and innovation, while fostering students’ personal leadership and
PHOTOS BY BU SCHOOL OF LAW AND BU PHOTOGRAPHY
in response to them,” O’Rourke says. “But to prepare our students for a different marketplace, we had to understand what they need in order to be effective practicing lawyers—yet most of us are not practicing lawyers ourselves.” To find answers, the faculty looked outside its walls, to a constituency both well-versed in the on-the-ground reality of the legal field and invested in the School’s long-term success. Last year, 33 alumni joined faculty and administrators for a retreat to discuss the evolving industry and how the School can adapt its curriculum to best equip its graduates for today’s job market. Faculty and administrators who attended found the alumni response invaluable. “What was really exciting was that we were hearing directly from employers out in the field as to what skills and qualities they wanted graduates from BU Law to possess,” says Naomi Mann, clinical associate professor of law. “Our task moving forward from the retreat was to translate what the employers stated they wanted from graduates into programs and practices at the School.” In response to alumni feedback, Dean O’Rourke established five faculty task forces: Writing, Advising, Competencies, Experiential Learning, and Long-Term Planning. Each was tasked with assessing the School’s performance in its focus area and proposing any necessary changes to ensure that the BU Law education continues to align with employers’ evolving expectations and needs.