University law clinic takes on mediation
By Tasha Kates

It was a bad night on the nursing home wing for incontinence.

Understaffed and underpaid, Nurse Phoebe was trying to clean up all 10 of her patients without any help. Allie, a resident’s daughter, arrived to find her mother in a mess and approached Phoebe about it.

Allie’s comments were the last straw for Phoebe, who was frustrated by Allie’s constant complaining. The women met again Friday in mock mediation, where two mediators-in-training helped the characters sort out their issues.

The role-play was part of a three-day basic mediation training session through the Mediation Center of Charlottesville. The latest session was held at the University of Virginia’s law school, where students received training as part of the new Family Alternative Dispute Resolution Clinic.

Patrice Kyger, the center’s acting director, said the 20-hour basic mediation course the clinic participants underwent will provide them with mediation basics and positive and reflective listening skills. The course prepares people to co-mediate cases referred from juvenile and domestic relations courts.

Read the entire article at The National Law Journal…

A tipping point for law schools?
It’s time to reassess how lawyers are taught and specifically consider whether more practical training is needed.
by JoAnne A. Epps

Few professions have been spared in the current economic crisis, with the business of law unquestionably among the most affected. As firms conduct mass layoffs for the first time in history and client frustration over billing structures hits new peaks, we may have reached a tipping point. It goes without saying that the fates of law schools and law firms go hand in hand, so perhaps this is an ideal time for academia and practitioners to come together to question, evaluate and reassess the way lawyers are trained.

During much of the past century, lawyers learned a great deal about the practice of law — the skills of interpersonal relationships and client development, and strategies to excel in negotiations, for example — more from observation while practicing law than in law school. As a result, law schools were free to focus on the theoretical — the erudite intellectual debate — and were not required to provide instruction on skills such as drafting interrogatories or subjects such as organizational psychology. I suspect we are past the time for this model to change.

Clients are refusing to underwrite the training of new lawyers and are demanding that their matters be handled by experienced lawyers. This obviously raises the question of where our next generation of attorneys will gain that experience.

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Temple University Beasley School of Law has long prided itself on blending theory and practice in a way that we believe gives our graduates a competitive advantage in the marketplace. We offered some of the first legal clinics and simulation courses in the nation, programs that are now ubiquitous. Along with our extensive externship program, every student is provided the opportunity for experiential learning.

Yet, like many law schools, Temple has embarked on an ambitious plan to re-evaluate our upper-level curriculum. In 2007, we established a corporate clerkship program to give students hands-on experience in corporate legal departments. We are also considering partnering judges and practitioners with professors to offer courses that blend high-level theory with current insights from the field.