Taking the First Step in Earnest: Daring to Build Better Lawyers

-- By ConnorHudson - 06 Mar 2022

Draft 1: Edits Forthcoming -- Cutting (WC: 1175) and Hyperlinks

Introduction

The Adaptable Mind: Neuroscience, Psychology, & Law School

The institutions inculcating students with American legal realism are divorced from the realities of legal practice and systematically place a premium on ivory tower idealism to the detriment of the pragmatism required to combat the various pathologies undermining student success in law school and following job placement, including above-average rates of depression and suicidal ideation. As a first step in daring to build better lawyers, rather than simply fulfilling the labor demands of the legal industry, law schools should create a first-year reading group emulating and integrating the psychological frameworks employed in leading universities and business schools -- The Adaptable Mind: Neuroscience, Psychology, and Law School.

By creating a space for students to learn and implement positive performance psychology throughout their legal education, students and schools can align on improving student outcomes, creating better lawyer-people and lawyer-managers -- attributes of increasing importance in law firms and in-house-- by effectuating student understanding of how the way we wire our brains catalyzes factors that drive multifaceted success, including reducing burnout, increasing resilience and long-term satisfaction, developing healthier relationships, and improving empathy-based soft skills. However, this is not merely a call for administrative altruism, as student benefits will inure to the success of the few schools who are humble enough to recognize the need for fundamental changes as transformative as they are trite.

An Illustration

While not the primary subject of discussion, I hope my arrival at, unceremonious departure from, and return to Columbia Law School will illustrate that this approach is not unbridled idealism, uninformed by the particularities of school administration, but rather a moral and pragmatic imperative. On March 15, 2020 -- the day that the U.S. first felt the weight of the epidemic -- my mother passed away following an extended battle with cancer, necessitating that I leave behind my senior spring at USC and move home to Tucson, Arizona to care for my brother and sister. While I would never dare abdicate this responsibility, these circumstances framed matriculation to Columbia as a saving grace, the end of my ordeal.

The following fall, I arrived to New York to a closed campus and abject isolation. Amidst the rolling hills of pompous praise heaped upon Columbia's "most competitive class yet," no one dared broach the question of whether we were equipped to undertake what promised to be a bleak semester in a desolate New York. For me, the requisite contemplation arrived too late, as an increasingly aggressive depression sapped my energy, undermined my retention, and cast me off towards despair. Thankfully, before I could succumb to the mounting weight of darkness, I found a moment of light in which to arrange a medical leave of absence.

In the intervening year, I found myself wanting for many of the most basic skills that had carried me to Columbia and arduously seeking to find at least an uncertain equilibrium. When I returned in the fall, I was met with the same canned hypocrisy as the year prior -- you are "brilliant" enough to receive autonomy where we want to abdicate responsibility, but must succeed within predetermined parameters of unflinching custom followed with blind fidelity. From my glance behind the curtain the previous fall, I knew the questions I needed to answer to fulfill my singular goal -- to survive, grades be damned -- and I struggled in isolation through several of the topics I now hope to see integrated into the 1L curriculum. Without the answers I found, I would not be here today.

The Adaptable Mind Reading Group

The Blueprint

The Adaptable Mind Reading Group can seamlessly integrate into the 1L curriculum and can be implemented by Fall 2022 by contextualizing the best practices of peer institutions. The foundations of the reading group would be derived from the proven successes of Harvard Business School's "Leadership and Happiness" course and Yale Professor Laurie Santos' lauded "Happiness and the Good Life" course.

Structure

The reading group would run for the first 10 weeks of each 1L semester through biweekly modules following two initial meetings to bookend fall Legal Methods.

Two sessions at the beginning of the fall semester will provide students with the crucial opportunity to frame the 1L experience as a period of subjective self-actualization, liberating students from the reductive, myopic focus on anachronistic and apocryphal conceptions of success in law school. Before the first day of Legal methods, students would participate in a workshop entitled "Who am I?" giving students the opportunity to reflect on what brought them to law school and set untainted goals before the mechanistic pressures of 1L fall ceaselessly incentivize conformity. Following the end of Legal Methods, students will be prompted to consider what will be required to personally succeed in a module entitled "How Do I Work?" These early workshops will reduce the infantilization of students in higher education by granting them the agency and space to determine their approach to law school.

Subsequently, the group will proceed through a series of two-week modules, focusing on topics that personalize professional growth, develop empathy, and destroy caustic false conceptions of isolated suffering, including Healthy Sleep Habits, Why Your Brain Feels the Way it Does (Forgetfulness, Brain Fog, etc.), Positive Psychology, and the Power of Emotions. During Week 1 of each module, students will be able to select between two 1-2-hour reading/lecture pairings within the overarching topic of the module. During Week 2 of each module, students will select between writing a 250 word reflection focusing on practical implementation or attend a student-mentor-led lunch discussion. Thus, the workshop will offer a reprieve for student agency in both the selection of learning and method of participation for the only time during the 1L experience. Additionally, by incentivizing candor and community participation, the reading group will create a space where students can situate themselves in the shared experience of law school and mindfully attend to their own needs without feeling compelled to paint themselves a classroom hero or fearing derogation for admitting vulnerability.

Institutional Benefits

As previously stated, this is not a self-serving plea for law schools to take administrative notice of struggles and problems they would rather not acknowledge. Instead, this structure will increase institutional productivity by catalyzing student success and providing meaningful differentiation in applicant attraction and matriculation. Currently, as firms, law schools are beholden to fulfilling a demand-side role in the legal-industrial complex, commodifying students, stifling possible intellectual innovations, and leaving value on the table. The Adaptable Mind reading group can help unlock the next generation of meaningful legal progress by supporting creative thinking about the legal profession during pupils' formative years and empowering diverse legal aspirations that are more reflective of the array of opportunities available to trained lawyers outside the sanctified triumvirate of BigLaw, Clerkships, and Public Interest. Furthermore, by implementing curriculums focused on driving subjective conceptions of student success, first-movers can improve candidate attraction and matriculation by achieving a meaningful competitive advantage over peer institutions.

Fin

Holistically, integrating the Adaptable Mind as a 1-unit, 2-semester reading group would be a first step towards daring to prepare students for a life, not a career, as a lawyer, unlocking student and institutional success in the process.

Research Links: https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/Documents/reunions/2021/Syllabus_Leadership_and_Happiness_MBA_Course_Spring_2021.pdf

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