Chapter 1: Externship Foundations
4 1.4 What Do Students Learn in an Externship?
Gemma Smyth
Introduction
Learning in an externship program requires a set of skills that will serve students throughout their professional careers. For example, students must employ self-directed approaches to learning, exhibit leadership in organizing their tasks to meet learning goals, and constantly reflect on their learning.
As we know, humans adapt to new experiences by building from past experience. Students can also consider these new experiences against the backdrop of both their past experiences and their future goals.
Reflection Questions
- Think back to when you first applied to law school. What interested you in applying? Has that changed after 1L? How does an externship fit into your overall goals for law school?
- This text digs into goal setting in a later chapter. For now, consider: Are there connections between your externship experience and your career goals? Personal growth goals?
Because externships come in so many different forms, there is a wide range of possible learning that comes from an externship placement. Some learning is about substantive areas of law ‘on the ground’. In a criminal law placement, the student might learn more about which arguments are particularly compelling in a bail hearing in front of a particular judge. Other learning outcomes are more “task-oriented” – learning how to write an opening letter or demand letter, for example. Others are about personal and professional development – such as learning how to set appropriate boundaries with clients, supervisors, and yourself. Others are about the nature of law – such as learning where gaps in the law lead to inequity for clients. Other learning is more intangible, perhaps about the culture of a particular firm. Many students talk about personal learning, perhaps about how to better manage their time, take care of their wellness, and about crafting their identity in the workplace.
Research on Competencies & Characteristics
Law students are likely familiar with constitutes success in a classroom context, and the competencies gained in this context. An externship shifts the focus to a different set of learning (although with overlapping competencies typically related to legal analysis and reasoning). There is growing empirical evidence related to what clients and lawyers value in practice. Some of this research might help students think more broadly or creatively about their learning goals. One set of competencies that are often neglected are those most important to clients. The Canadian Bar Association’s “Futures Report” examined some of these competencies.
Canadian Bar Association (CBA) “Futures Report”
“The Legal Futures Initiative canvassed participants about changing client expectations and the practice of law, and what clients value most from their counsel. Technology, cost pressures, and business management tools are already transforming relationships between lawyers and their clients. Even the concept of value in legal services has shifted; thinking like a client means that lawyers are moving beyond traditional conflict resolution to providing increasingly strategic and tailored problem-solving or avoidance.”
Part of the research included interviews with clients. Some of the findings are described below.
Clients and value
The following characteristics were identified most often as those that clients value:
- Honesty, even when that honesty requires that the client be disappointed;
- Integrity, also described as objectivity or an independent mind;
- Effective communication in dispensing advice and listening, and demonstrating a willingness to engage the client as an active participant in the management of their own matter;
- Empathy, or as described by senior in-house counsel from the NGO sector, “good bedside manner.”
Inherent within these traits is the lawyer’s ability to connect with clients. A mid-career private practitioner noted that a good lawyer possesses “the ability to understand what the client sees as important, rather than what the lawyer sees as important.” Our increasingly sophisticated and cross-border world demands new skills from lawyers. Emerging indicators of value identified by respondents ranged from business acumen to public relations, risk management, expertise in creating legal teams, facility to work in multi-disciplinary teams, and strategic, visionary thinking.”
Canadian Bar Association, “CBA Legal Futures Initiative: Report on the Consultation” (February 21, 2014) at 7.
Another source of empirical evidence regarding what lawyers think are important competencies is contained in the IAALS “Foundations for Practice” report. Consider the overlap and departures from the CBA Report.
Foundations for Practice
The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) has conducted significant empirical research into what competencies might comprise “the whole lawyer”. The IAALS research team interviewed over 24,000 lawyers at various stages in their careers about the legal skills, professional competencies, and characteristics that make lawyers successful. Previously, more traditional notions of practice excellence focused on substantive legal knowledge. The IAALS Foundations for Practice report found something quite different:
“76% of characteristics (things like integrity, work ethic, common sense, and resilience) were identified by a majority of respondents as necessary right out of law school. When we talk about what makes people—not just lawyers— successful we have come to accept that they require some threshold intelligence quotient (IQ) and, in more recent years, that they also require a favorable emotional intelligence (EQ)… [S]uccessful entry-level lawyers are not merely legal technicians, nor are they merely cognitive powerhouses. The current dichotomous debate that places “law school as trade school” up against “law school as intellectual endeavor” is missing the sweet spot and the vision of what legal education could be and what type of lawyers it should be producing. New lawyers need some legal skills and require intelligence, but they are successful when they come to the job with a much broader blend of legal skills, professional competencies, and characteristics that comprise the whole lawyer.”
This image from the “Foundations for Practice” report, demonstrate the array of skills that their research has shown are important for excellence in lawyering.
The IAALS Report is a useful tool to expand consciousness around what law students might learn in an externship, especially as it pertains to their entry-level practice.
Reflection Questions
It is also important to keep in mind that the placement site learns from the student. Many supervisors talk about the impact students have had on their organization and themselves personally and professionally.
- What might your placement site learn from you?
- In your previous work experiences supervising or working with someone else, what did you learn from them?
