Chapter 2: Professional Identity Formation

This Chapter introduces the concept of “professional identity formation”. What is it? How does professional identity formation matter in an externship? Before engaging with these and other questions, we ask the student to situate themselves. This practice – common in the social sciences – acknowledges that lawyers do not divorce themselves entirely from their work. Indeed, authors such as Bellow and Moulton argue that lawyers do bring their morals, expectations, biases and so on to the lawyer-client relationship. In fact, they can be powerful  motivator in justice work. Unacknowledged, however, they can also be harmful. This is why self-exploration and self-knowledge is so important. Understanding oneself can help lawyers make conscious choices about whether and how they will engage in their work. Lawyers can “feed” and cultivate a range of parts of themselves; likewise, they can neglect other parts that, like plants, can wither and fade.

This Chapter introduces a few ideas about personal identity formation before reviewing some ideas, tools and questions to support the lifelong journey of professional identity formation.