Legal Methods II: Problem Solving for Lawyers

The course is intended to help prepare you for the actual practice of law by allowing you to actively engage in the sorts of discussions and activities that occupy real lawyers every day, combining their knowledge of law with practical judgment to help clients attain their goals within the bounds of the law. It is also intended to help you become the kind of thoughtful practicing lawyer who can see the theoretical issues lurking behind everyday events.
What sorts of problems do lawyers solve? How do they solve them? What intellectual constructs do they bring to bear? What practical judgments? This workshop-style course will help answer these questions by giving you a chance to practice confronting client problems the way lawyers do, from the very beginning, before the facts are all known, before the client's goals are clarified, before the full range of options is explored, and before a course of conduct is chosen. You will undertake these tasks by working in teams on a number of different problems in different lawyering settings. You will be writing short memos of the kind written by practicing lawyers, identifying facts that need to be gathered, questions the client needs to answer, and options that should be considered as well as writing memos interpreting laws that impinge on the problem and recommending a course of action.
A key aspect of the course (reflective of legal practice, but not of most traditional first-year law school work) is the expectation that students work collaboratively and submit group work product. . The required work product takes the form of the kind of memos, analyses, and advice written by practicing lawyers daily. Deadlines are tight, as they often are for lawyers seeking to respond with immediacy to particular client problems.
There is no final exam, but there is a short final memo, to be completed individually, that asks you to reflect and debrief on your experiences in the class.
Daily attendance, as well as participation in the afternoon team work, is required. You will also be asked to fill out daily assessments that offer constructive feedback to the other members of your team. (The feedback will be anonymized; individual team members will see a summary of their teammates’ assessments, but will not be able to see which feedback comes from which teammate.)
The grading will be on a credit/no credit basis. Good faith participation in class and the afternoon team meeting, together with completion of the daily assessments and the final debriefing memo, will be sufficient to earn credit.