Focus on success

Focus on success

by Suzanne Bowness

Focus Week allows students to take crash courses on new topics and dive deeply into others through instruction from experts in their fields.

For Sidney Black-Rotchin (1), a BCL/JD student in her final semester, the chance to be immersed in the world of self-represented litigants not only allowed her to explore an area of interest, but helped sharpen her thinking for a term essay she was writing.

The opportunity presented itself during Focus Week, a program launched by the Faculty in 2017 that offers optional, week-long intensive courses on subjects ranging from entrepreneurship to policy analysis to technology. In October and February, regular upperyear classes are suspended for a week. Focus Weeks are sponsored by the McCarthy Tétrault Fund for Innovative Legal Education.

This year marked Black-Rotchin’s third time taking advantage of the mid-semester offerings. She had previously taken Focus Week workshops on migration and negotiation skills, the former to sample an international law topic, and the latter for hard skills development.

“It’s an opportunity to sample an interesting topic that I’m unsure about — I can try it before committing a semester to studying it,” she says.

In the workshop on self-represented litigants, which is so popular it has been offered multiple years running, Black-Rotchin learned from practitioners who were passionate and knowledgeable.

“I figured it would be handy to pick one that would overlap with the content of my paper, which focused on the harmful psychological impacts of engaging with the civil justice system in Canada, and how litigation stress can act as a barrier to access to justice. The Focus Week course ended up really being helpful. I cited a lot of the cases,” says Black-Rotchin.

Professor Rosalie Jukier (2), Associate Dean (Academic), BCL’83, LLB’83, is a key organizer of Focus Week. She says the program originated as a way to offer learning about topics that were not covered elsewhere in the program. Today, five workshops are offered per session, with 20 to 25 students in each. Students are graded on a pass/fail basis.

“It’s a short-term investment, and a real opportunity to gain a different perspective, to learn from alumni or community members in the field. It’s very positively received by students. Our Focus Week courses are full every term,” Jukier says.

The Faculty began offering a summer version of Focus Week in 2020, when the pandemic cancelled many students’ internships and other opportunities.

Connecting with students

Interest in Focus Week has grown within the alumni and wider legal community, Jukier says. More and more instructors are eager to connect with students by offering a workshop.

One such instructor is Sonia Struthers (3), BCL’87, LLB’87, a partner with McCarthy Tétrault, who taught a Focus Week course in October 2018 and again in 2020. She teamed up with McCarthy colleagues and guest presenters from the business community to teach “Anatomy of the Deal,” which centres around mergers and acquisitions.

Struthers says being an instructor allows her to pass along knowledge and skills which are helpful to beginning lawyers. These include business evaluation methods, project management, and team client service, all skills she wishes she’d had earlier in her career. It also allows her to fulfil her own interest in teaching, and to get to know soon-to-be lawyers.

“A full course is a big commitment, so this is the perfect format,” Struthers says.

For Dessislav Dobrev (4), a senior legal counsel for the World Bank Group, teaching a recent Focus Week course afforded the opportunity to fulfil a passion for academia and pass along his knowledge on artificial intelligence (AI). Dobrev’s Focus Week curriculum focused on deep discussions about the benefits and challenges of this emerging technology.

“The course is intended to equip students with the tools necessary to be prepared for the incoming AI wave,” says Dobrev, noting that he believes AI will bring about profound change on the practice and regulation of law.

Karen Dunn Skinner, BCL’93, LLB’93, and David Skinner (5), BCL’91, LLB’91, are partners in life as well as in their consultancy Gimbal Lean Practice Management Advisors. They met at McGill and now co-teach a Focus Week course, “Thinking like an innovator.”

They first taught their Focus Week course in February 2020 and did so again remotely in 2021. In addition to sharing ideas on topics such as innovation, productivity, project management and process improvement, they like to show students that there are many paths to explore with their law degrees.

“We like to share an alternative path. Many go to law school to practise law, but there are a ton of interesting things that you can do in law in addition to practice,” says David Skinner.

Karen Skinner adds that their course also prepares young lawyers by showing them a mix of hard and soft skills that are helpful when starting out.

Indeed, Black-Rotchin agrees that one of the best benefits of Focus Week is that the courses use different approaches from traditional ones.

“I find the way we’re evaluated is always different, and the courses allow for quite a bit of exploration and reflection,” she says.