Name: Lawrence M. Grosberg
Title: Professor of Law
School: New York Law School
Mailing Address:
57 Worth Street
New York, NY 10013
Phone: 212-431-2172
Email: lgrosberg@nyls.edu
Home Page: http://www.nyls.edu/pages/368.asp
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Summary Description:
The goal of our first-year Lawyering course is to introduce students to fact analysis, interviewing and counseling, and more generally, to the role of the lawyer. It is taught in the second semester and builds on the legal reasoning and analysis skills that are at the core of all first-year courses. We place the students in the context of specific simulated client situations, and call on them to apply their legal analyses in an interview of a client, an interview of a witness and in a counseling session with a client. Our entering class is a large one, more than 500 students this past fall. Most of the first-year curriculum, including Lawyering, is taught in sections of 110-125 students. These numbers present a challenge for anyone trying to teach lawyering skills.
Based on a model that is used in medical schools, we developed the concept of “standardized clients” (SCs). These are lay persons who are trained to act as clients (or witnesses, despite the term standardized clients) in a simulated interview or counseling session and then to provide written feedback to the students on their performance. The written critique is done on a checklist that the professors prepare. Our standardization training of the roleplayers is twofold: first, we work with the actors who are roleplaying John Doe to achieve a standardized portrayal of the same individual; and second, we train them to use common criteria to evaluate the student performances in a standardized manner.
We are now using three different SC exercises in three different units in Lawyering. In the first unit, based on a potential tort claim, each of the 500 students conducts an initial interview of a client with a possible claim. After the interview is completed, the SC completes an evaluation form for that student. The student completes a self-evaluation form that exactly parallels the SC form. The following day each student picks up copies of her or his form and the SC form for that student and is able to compare the two evaluations. Before the next class, the professor will have viewed a random selection of 6-10 videotapes of those SC exercises as well as copies of the same paired evaluation forms. The professors will then conduct class using the results of that exercise. The same thing is then done for the second unit, an interview of a witness in a contracts case, and for the third unit, a counseling session with a client in a property case.
This method of providing individualized feedback to a student through the use of trained roleplayers is an evaluation tool that has proven to be a valid evaluation technique for assessing the performance of medical students. We have found it to be a fair and effective vehicle in Lawyering as well. By contexualizing the students' experiences, it enables us to address some of the difficult role and professionalism issues that new lawyers confront while still pursuing our objective that they apply the law correctly and skillfully in each situation.
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Program History:
I have been working on the development of the standardized client for more than six years. After learning of and observing the use of standardized patients in the medical school context, I first conducted an experiment with my upper class simulation course, Negotiating, Counseling and Interviewing. I trained actors to roleplay the client in a counseling exercise and to complete written evaluation forms that I had prepared. I then asked the four teachers with whom I was teaching the course to complete the same evaluation form that the SC actors had completed. The teachers had first graded their students in the usual fashion irrespective of what they then put on the written SC forms. I then compared the results of the actors and the teachers. While the class of 45 or so did not produce a statistically significant sample, we were able to establish a significant positive association between the actors’ results and the professors’ - - a correlation coefficient of the overall assessments of .50. Or, putting it simply, there was significant similarity in the grading done by the two groups.
Based on the results of that experiment, I designed a witness interview SC exercise for one section of our Lawyering course; the110 student section that I was teaching. At that time, we were using a single case file for the entire semester (at that point, Lawyering was in the fall of the first year). The students interviewed one of two witnesses who had information relevant to the case. After reviewing the results from that first Lawyering pilot, I conferred with my colleagues and we decided to go ahead and implement the same SC exercise for all four sections of Lawyering. The other Lawyering professors and I worked on refining the evaluation checklists that we were using. Upon completion of the SC exercises, I also conducted a detailed survey of student assessments of the SC experiences. My own anecdotal observations and the student evaluations were quite positive and we continued using that exercise successfully for two or three years.
More recently, in part, as an effort to increase the use of the SC concept, we re-designed the Lawyering course (now in the second semester of the first year), using three different case files. Students would now be called on to complete three SC exercises during the Lawyering course. Our goal was to strengthen the foundation for their future clinical and skills and ultimate lawyering work, by increasing their first year immersion into lawyering roles. Once again, the professors who teach this course collectively drafted and revised the roleplay instructions for the three new SC roles and designed appropriate training sessions for achieving the standardization goals. This spring, we will implement our third iteration of this three SC program for Lawyering. Thus, we will conduct approximately 1500 SC exercises this spring. Overall, I would estimate that, to date, more than 2500 students have conducted three SC exercises in their first year of law school, and at least three times that number have conducted one SC exercise at New York Law School.
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Confidential Items:
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Expanded Program Description (Optional):
My goals for the expansion of the SC program are ambitious and, at the same time, I believe, realistic and solidly based. I would like to proceed on three fronts, all of which require the establishment of a facility in which large numbers of SC exercises could be administered in an efficient and cost effective manner. Such a physical facility would house a center in which 8-12 interview rooms with built-video and a control/observation room in which one or more of the sessions in the interview rooms could be observed. The facility would serve a dual purpose: 1) a place to train SC roleplayers; and 2) a place where law students could conduct SC exercises. Once again, the model for this is the Morchand Center at Mt. Sinai Medical School in New York City in which medical students from medicals schools throughout the metropolitan area conduct “standardized patient” exercises. Similarly, I would like to establish the position of an educational director to oversee the hiring, training, monitoring and administering of such a center, as it has been done in the Morchand Center. The professors would continue to design both the exercises and the SC evaluation forms to be used at such a center.
The first aspect of the activities of such an SC center would be to design SC exercises for other first year classes at New York Law School. For example, the civil procedure teachers would work with me to select an opinion or a series of opinions that would be the basis of an SC exercise (some kind of an interview or counseling session). We would draft the roleplay instructions and the evaluation forms and review and revise them. The civil procedure teachers would be involved to whatever extent they wished. The students in civil procedure would then be assigned to complete the SC exercise prior to the date when the case(s) were to be discussed in class. The professors in those classes could integrate discussion of the role and lawyering aspects of the exercise to whatever extent they wished, or not at all. The Lawyering course would be revised to take into account the extent to which other courses were assigning SC exercises. The SC exercises would be graded in some fashion, either as part of civil procedure or Lawyering. Gradually, other SC exercises would be designed in a similar fashion for all of the first year courses (perhaps one or two per course). I believe my colleagues would be receptive to this kind of collaboration because it would not necessarily require any commitment to discuss or teach any of the role and lawyering objectives that are pursued in Lawyering. At the same time, as long as the exercises were graded, it would communicate to the students the importance of these skills.
The second aspect of such an expansion is to conduct research. Unlike our medical colleagues, neither I nor anyone else to my knowledge has conducted research to establish in a statistically significant fashion, the validity and reliability and fairness of this method of evaluating the performance of law students. By increasing substantially, the numbers of SC exercises, and centralizing the conduct and compilation of data at such a center, valuable research could be conducted to determine whether this technique should be replicated elsewhere.
Finally, the center could be the base for establishing the kind of collaborative consortium among the many local law schools in the New York metropolitan area that the Morchand Center represents in medical education. I had previously begun negotiations along these lines and I believe that once such a center were established, that neighboring law schools would want to participate, and ultimately support such a collective venture.
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Supporting Materials:
I refer you to my earlier article available on line, Medical Education Again Provides a Model for Law Schools: The Standardized Patient Becomes the Standardized Client, 51 J. Legal Educa 212 (2001), which discusses my work in this area as of a couple of years ago. Also, I refer you to my website ( http://www.nyls.edu/grosberg/) on which are earlier samples of the SC evaluation forms and student survey results. If there is additional information you would like, I would be happy to provide it. Just let me know.