Collaboration in Theatre and the Law

In law school, we may be told that lawyers succeed when they collaborate, but we are not taught to work together. At the risk of drawing a grand and imperfect metaphor, I’m going to look at how collaboration works in a field that I know fairly well - the theatre - to see how we could improve it here in law school.

The Theatre as Collaboration

The most innovative theatre of the past thirty years has been created by small ensembles in which all members share responsibility for the group’s projects. It matters little which member contributes what. The spirit matches almost a truism of the theatre – that it is a collaborative process, and its product is built by the creative influence of many people working together. Being seen as the standout performer in a mediocre show, among theatre people, is to be seen as a failure.

This does not mean that artists are not competitive – they believe their show is and must be better than the one down the street, and they can be as cutthroat and catty as the worst moments of The Paper Chase. But within one rehearsal room, artists depend upon each other – they will sink or swim together. Their goal, competitive as it may be, is to make the performance better, and they will not do that by showing off to each others’ detriment.

Lawyers collaborate; Law students compete.

Lawyers too do their best work in teams, working together to serve a client or idea. Even solo practitioners collaborate when they need to -- the criminal attorney in Boulder worked alongside SFLC. If in law school we mainly worked together to come up with more innovative solutions to complicated problems, then, they would be learning to be more like lawyers.

But we don’t. We may meet for the occasional study group or join teams for moot court, but we measure our success or failure individually. We then turn to each other and moan that competition is forced on us. And when our peers ask for advice, we tell them to play it as it lays – a 2L who is a fan of this course and who advised me to take it, answered, when I asked, “What is the point of the elective?” that “The point of the elective is to get an A.”

Reform to Foster Collaboration

Incentivizing collaboration is a different challenge than reforming grades or the curve per say – the arguments for and against metrics to measure us by are familiar and don’t really need rehashing. Even with grades, even with a curve, the school could measure how we work as parts of a team, rather than as artificially isolated individuals. The American spirit of individualism infests our entire educational system, of course, but is particularly inappropriate to the law school, where it paradoxically is most manifest.

One simple scheme would be to divide a class (of a hundred students for example) into randomly selected groups of five, and assign each group a detailed writing assignment to be done during the reading period. The members of each group would all receive the same grade. The system would not produce extra work for professors, since it is hard to believe that reading 20 papers is more time consuming or less enjoyable than reading 100 exams. It would not de-incentivize students from reading or studying, because they would not know their topic before the end of the semester. There may be some freeloading, but members of the group with the freeloader in it could be expected to deal with the situation as adults. The teams, like teams in any field--like little theatre companies--would rely on each other, and compete, if competition is desired, with the other groups.

Hurdles to Reform

If the dean were to propose the above reform tomorrow, however, the howls of protest would most likely come not from the faculty, but from the students. Students worried that unprepared peers would drag their grade down would complain, and work-averse students who realize that the plan would be in fact more challenging than cramming may also raise a stink. What we collaborate best on is creating a culture anathema to the very idea of working together -- the fault is not in our school but in our selves.

Even in this class, given a wiki and a blank slate for topics, we have had many debates, but the only thing we have created as a group is the music list. We are too protective of our own work, too worried about encroaching on the work of others, and too focused on some perception of a bottom line to truly collaborate with each other.

So What?

It would be easy for me to say this is because so many students are young, or have not collaborated before, or are listening to a voice from above telling them what to do. But this would conveniently exclude me from the problem, and thus smacks of the very individualism that plagues us. If we want things to change, we have to take it upon ourselves to change them. If I want to learn from my fellow students, I have to reach out to them and ask them for help, and offer my help to them. We will only turn the ocean liner we are on by making personal choices and implementing them on whatever scale we can.

As a first tiny step, I have incorporated significant comments and edits from three other students in this class in this paper. In return, I will be offering what comments I can on each of their papers. It is a small step on a small assignment, but who knows, it might be habit-forming.

-- AndrewCase - 08 May 2009