AustLII Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback

Legal Education Digest

Legal Education Digest
You are here:  AustLII >> Databases >> Legal Education Digest >> 2013 >> [2013] LegEdDig 9

Database Search | Name Search | Recent Articles | Noteup | LawCite | Author Info | Download | Help

Rowe, M et al --- "Professionalism in pre-practice legal education: an insight into the universal nature of professionalism and the development of professional identity" [2013] LegEdDig 9; (2013) 21(1) Legal Education Digest 32


Professionalism in pre-practice legal education: an insight into the universal nature of professionalism and the development of professional identity

M Rowe, M Murray and F Westwood

The Law Teacher, Vol 46, No. 2, 2012, pp 120-131

This article offers insight into the universality of professionalism in legal education. It does so in the context of an evaluation of a unit that forms part of the Australian National University (ANU) Legal Workshop Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice. The evaluation is undertaken with reference to a UK course and the experience upon which the ANU Legal Workshop course is based.

In 2010, ANU Legal Workshop commenced teaching part of its Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice in a simulated virtual office, based on the ‘working in firms’ model developed in the Glasgow Graduate School of Law (GGSL) at the University of Strathclyde.

There is an ongoing debate about what legal professionalism means today. Some commentators believe that the traditional ideals of legal professionalism have all but disappeared as a result of market pressures, technology and the global economy, replaced by a narrow view of professionalism as technical competence and adherence to the written rules of the profession only. The broader and more traditional view of professionalism that we prefer is characterised by a number of attributes going far beyond mere technical competence.

The literature identifies the traditionally understood attributes of professionalism as autonomy, task variety competence, collegiality and public service orientation. Legal professionalism has the additional attributes of a primary duty to the court and administration of justice and a fiduciary duty to the client.

Developing a shared culture by demonstrating the complexity of making professional decisions is an excellent way of enabling students to see ‘practice in action’ where the ‘goal is to develop students into practitioners who can respond capably and self-confidently to demands for professional service’.

The GGSL and ANU Legal Workshop courses are designed to enable students to experience ‘practice in action’. The courses make use of a simulated legal office and virtual legal firms to teach legal skills as a means to enable students to begin to acquire and develop professional values before they enter the legal profession.

Sullivan argues that there are three clusters of values in professional education: ‘the values of the academy, the values of professional practice and the ethical, social values of professional identity’ and that each may be given a different weight and balance depending on each institution or profession. He points out that the last domain is developed by the ‘powerfully socializing experience’ of working on a daily basis with teachers and other students.

Stuckey offers an explanation of the essential importance of values as providing the ‘bases from which preferences arise and on which all decisions are made. They guide human action and decisions in daily situations.’ The clusters of values and their socialising experience argued by Sullivan result in law firms developing their own identities and personalities that become their ‘character’, shaping them and the people that work there. As a result Regan extrapolates that a ‘sufficiently rich account of professionalism ... must be attentive to law firms not simply as collections of lawyers but as social forms that play an important role in constructing and expressing the values of the legal profession’.

Kelly in his analysis of a number of real legal firms recognises the importance that all ‘have a ... clear sense of who they are, what are their goals as an organisation and the set of values that inform how they act’.

The beginning of the GGSL and ANU Legal Workshop courses is often the first time students have put their minds to the values and attributes they aspire to personally and professionally as part of a legal team. The aim is to encourage students to continue this thinking when they are considering jobs in the real world, and to be aware of the importance of a match between their own professional values and those of any potential employer. For people to work together successfully they must be able to share a system of beliefs about the goals and values that are important to them.

Stuckey talks about professionalism as represented by professional values. He provides a list that mirrors what the GGSL and ANU Legal Workshop programmes seek to embed via the virtual firms that includes: (1) handling cases professionally (recognising the broader implications of your work; considering the interests and values of clients and others; providing high quality services at fair cost; maintaining independence of judgement; embodying honour, integrity and fair play; being truthful and candid; exhibiting diligence and punctuality; showing courtesy and respect towards others; and complying with rules and expectations of the profession); (2) managing law practice effectively and efficiently; (3) engaging in professional self-development; (4) nurturing quality of life; and (5) supporting the aims of the legal profession by providing access to justice; upholding the vitality and effectiveness of the legal system; promoting justice, fairness and morality; and encouraging diversity.

Traditional law teaching does little to address these values and attributes which could be said to be at the core of a lawyer’s professional identity. As the working in firms model simulates legal practice and the work conditions in which professional identity formation usually takes place, it provides an effective model for the development of professional identity prior to formal entry to practice. In addition through assessment practices that reward these attributes and values, which are role modelled by the senior partners and associate ‘characters’ (played by teachers) in the virtual firm, students are guided in the formation of their notion of professionalism.

GGSL students attend in person over a 30-week period, working in groups on their virtual firm projects at the same time as being taught face to face in subject-specific tutorials. The student cohort was typically around 280 students who had been undergraduates at various Scottish universities.

The ANU Legal Workshop course is taught wholly online and lasts 18 weeks. Prior to commencing the course students complete a five-day skills-intensive course where the majority of students entering the course are introduced to the other members of their ‘virtual firm’ and to the skills that they will practise throughout the course.

The student cohort is large (currently there are 500 students undertaking the course each semester – 1000 a year). Students enrol from all over Australia, come from approximately 10-15 different universities and some are based overseas while they complete the course. Throughout the course, staff and students rely on web conferencing technology, email and telephone to stay in contact.

After the first and second iterations of the course at ANU Legal Workshop, feedback was sought from both students and teachers and a number of key themes were identified including: (1) the need to develop successful ways to tackle initial lack of engagement with the course and initial lack of commitment to the virtual firm; (2) the need to develop strategies for dealing with dysfunctional virtual firms; and (3) the development of professionalism within the virtual firms.

Notwithstanding the differences in how the two courses were taught, these themes mirrored what had been observed at GGSL.

Virtual firms quickly struck difficulties if the individuals in the firms had varying levels of commitment to the course and to the group. The most common complaint from students was about other students who did not communicate and engage with their virtual firm or the course. Not all students placed the same importance on professional values such as diligence, respect for other firm members, clear and timely communication and time management.

Lack of engagement with the group and the course is arguably more problematic in an online course where students are not meeting face to face but relying on technology to communicate with one another.

ANU Legal Workshop tackled these issues in three ways, by (1) ensuring, where possible face-to-face interaction could occur; (2) undertaking a values exercise developed by GGSL; and (3) early intervention from Practice Mentors who work with the firms during the course to emphasise the importance of adhering to professional standards.

ANU Legal Workshop realised early on the importance of firm members meeting face to face where possible, and the impact this meeting has in accelerating the development of trust and mutual obligation between firm members. Though logistically difficult as the initial five-day intensive is run in eight different cities throughout Australia several times each year, every effort is made to ensure that students are placed in their firms on the first day of these intensives. Where this occurs, the firms generally work better as they move to their online work.

Although it is possible to develop professional values while learning in an online environment, the process of developing those values is enhanced by the springboard of initial face-to-face contact.

Students are also allowed to nominate those they want to work with in the course. One advantage of allowing students to choose their firm members is that they already share a set of values, formed when they worked together as undergraduates or in a workplace where they are all currently employed, that they can build upon in the course.

ANU Legal Workshop has recognised the importance of encouraging students to discuss their personal values as a group and then reach a consensus about the values their firm will adopt as they work together through the course.

The starting point in the course is for students in each firm to discuss and agree on a set of shared values which are of most importance to the firm and which will guide the way in which the firm operates. These values are included in a firm partnership agreement and students are referred back to their agreed values as the first step in resolving any firm difficulties or issues.

The values exercise was developed by GGSL for its course and ANU Legal Workshop found the exercise works well in its course.

The identification of each individual’s personal values so as to discuss and agree a group of agreed firm’s values encourages ‘behaviours such as listening and constructively responding to points of view expressed by others, giving others the benefit of the doubt, providing support to those who need it and recognising the interests and achievements of others’.

Working in this cooperative way first allows people to observe and monitor each other and secondly, as Barker argues, it creates ‘a system of value-based rational rules ... They have put themselves under their own eye of the norm, resulting in a powerful system of control’. This in turn allows the ‘development of personal transferable skills’ that are now required by the professions to enable them to reflect on their own knowledge and skills as well as manage themselves, others and information.

ANU Legal Workshop assigns Practice Mentors to work with the firms as they progress through the course. Practice Mentors actively observe their firms throughout the course and will stage timely interventions when they see students who are not engaged with their firm or in other ways not acting professionally.

Given the online delivery mode, Practice Mentors cannot deal with these issues by talking face to face with the students involved. However, Practice Mentors can talk with students by web conference, Skype, email and telephone. Practice Mentors also work with the virtual firm as a whole to set in place good work allocation routines and communication procedures to minimise recurrence of the problem.

The ‘working in firms’ model was developed at GGSL in response to the experiences of its students working in groups of four in virtual law firms, completing a series of legal transactions with formative and summative assessment based on their ‘firm’ performance.

While this was regarded as a ‘safe’ learning environment for the students, in that they were not exposed to working with real clients, the reality was that individual student learning was determined by the success of the dynamics in their group. Given the short duration of this course, students had limited time before undertaking their client projects to get to know each other and gain an appreciation of individual abilities and styles of working.

One particular source of information detailing the GGSL student experience was contained in the individual Reflective Reports that were the required assessed piece of work for the compulsory Practice Management (PM) module. It was decided to analyse these reports in detail over a three-year period, and a matrix was developed to assess the trust and learning of individual firms. This identified four types of firm, described as (1) Learning Communities (high trust and high learning); (2) Legal Eagles (low trust and high learning); (3) Happy Families (high trust and low learning); and (4) Dysfunctional (low trust and low learning).

In the first iteration of the ANU Legal Workshop course, two virtual firms were identified as being dysfunctional. Those firms were dissolved. In both cases there was a failure within the firm to cohesively develop a shared set of professional values, which led to a complete breakdown in trust and the ability to work together as a team. Intervention from Practice Mentors was needed in four other virtual firms who were displaying dysfunctional characteristics – the most common problem being a lack of communication and trust within the firm. Practically, the lack of trust was evidenced by students being unwilling to allow others to have input into a task, reacting negatively to feedback from other firm members and/or other firm members giving unconstructive feedback that was overly negative.

When first faced with these problems, ANU Legal Workshop staff were concerned that the online delivery mode may have been the cause of the failure of the firms to work well together. In speaking with GGSL about the issue, it became apparent that the virtual firms were exhibiting many of the same problems that virtual firms had exhibited at GGSL and that the percentages of dysfunctional firms, that is, those with low trust and low learning, were almost the same in the two programmes.

ANU Legal Workshop recognised that dysfunction is inevitable for a small number of firms working within the course. While these firms will develop competent legal skills, they are slower to develop shared professional values. This means that members of the firm will be behind their student cohort in developing their professional identity.

At the end of the first iteration of the ANU Legal Workshop course, a decision was taken to minimise dysfunction within firms by ensuring Practice Mentors worked closely with all firms to ensure they appreciated the importance of adopting a professional approach to their work and interactions with each other and with staff. Early intervention was undertaken if firms showed signs of struggling with this approach and were slow to develop shared professional values.

In the latest survey of students to have completed the Professional Practice Core in 2011, the significant majority of students felt that the programme was effective in encouraging professional conduct among colleagues.

One of the important underlying purposes of this article is to consider the universality of legal professionalism and legal professional values in legal education.

Superficially there would appear to be a number of differences between the approach to entering the legal profession used by Scotland and Australia.

Notwithstanding these differences, it is clear that the bodies that govern admission to practice in both Scotland and Australia require students to demonstrate entry level competence that includes an awareness and demonstration of legal professionalism and legal professional values.

The comparison of experiences in the GGSL and ANU Legal Workshop programmes indicates that legal professional identity has universal elements and that professional working can be embedded in student learning even where that occurs wholly online.

Our analysis provides insight into the role that culture plays in the development of professionalism and professional values in legal education prior to entry to practice, regardless of jurisdictional differences. This provides reassurance in response to the increasing pressures for globalisation and the socialising role of institutions such as law firms.

One of the underlying purposes of using virtual law firms in legal education is to mirror the reality of professional legal practice in a safe environment where students can test their application of their knowledge in the context of working in virtual law firms on typical client projects. The virtual firm is also the vehicle through which we can teach, and facilitate the development of, professional identity.

Working together on simulated client projects results in students tending to exhibit similar behaviours and attitudes such as a lack of engagement and tensions around inter-firm dynamics. By exploring and agreeing a shared set of professional values supported by experienced tutors, it seems possible to improve both individual and team performance and to provide these fledging practitioners with an understanding of the application of legal professionalism before they enter practice.

The Carnegie Report argues that there are six tasks that legal education must tackle to prepare professionals. The most relevant for this article are developing the capacity to engage in complex practice, learning to make judgements under conditions of uncertainty, learning from experience and participating in a responsible and effective community. We feel that working in simulated law firms addresses all of these elements in a structured and blended way and allows students the opportunity to experience the benefits of professionalism and develop their professional identity.


AustLII: Copyright Policy | Disclaimers | Privacy Policy | Feedback
URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/LegEdDig/2013/9.html