The development of the
virtual educational space: how transactional online teaching can
prepare
today’s law graduates for today’s virtual age
Cite as Lee E.S. & Ferguson A., “The
development of the virtual educational space: how transactional online
teaching
can prepare today’s law graduates for today’s virtual
age”, in European Journal
of Law and Technology, Vol 6, No 1, 2015.
ABSTRACT
Professional
legal education, like many aspects of our lives, is now under increased
pressure to move into the virtual spaces afforded by digital
technologies. The rising popularity of
social media
platforms such as Instagram, service-type apps such as Passport, dating
and
social networking apps such as Tinder and the growth in and ease of
access to
online education through platforms such as Massive Open Online Courses
(MOOCs)
all highlight the increasingly pervasive nature of the Internet in many
aspects
of our lives. The ascent of the Internet is also reflected in the
changing
characteristics and demographics of our student cohorts and the
changing legal
environment – for example the prevalence of offshore outsourcing,
more
sophisticated clients, increasingly egalitarian access to legal
information and
virtual law firms
Such
spaces, when used for teaching and professional development, have
profound
implications for the nature and character of that teaching and
development. In this article we argue
that specific factors in Australia, such as geography (which limits
physical
access to professional legal education), the history and cultures of
legal
education programmes, and recent changes in the regulatory frameworks
for legal
education, require law graduates to be equipped with more than the
legal
knowledge and skills that are currently required for admission to
practice. With reference to digital
educational theory, we analyse one instance of a program where
transactional
learning deepens and enhances students’ professionalism. We then investigate the consequences of
programs
such as this for the design of regulatory regimes in legal education.
Keywords: Professional
legal education; technology;
digital education; regulation; experiential learning
INTRODUCTION
The space used for teaching and
professional development has profound implications on the nature and
character
of that teaching and development.
Professional legal education, like many
aspects of our lives, is now under increased pressure to move into the
‘virtual
space’[1]. The rising popularity of
social media
platforms[2]
such as Instagram, service-type apps such
as
Passport, dating and social networking apps such as Tinder and the
growth in
and ease of access to online education through platforms such as
Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs) all highlight the increasingly pervasive nature
of the
Internet in all aspects of our lives. The ascent of the Internet is
also
reflected in the changing characteristics and demographics of our
student
cohorts and the changing legal environment – i.e. the prevalence
of offshore
outsourcing, more sophisticated clients, increasingly egalitarian
access to
legal information and ‘virtual law firms’[3].
In the educational context, factors such as
the nature of Australia’s wide landscape (which limits physical
access to
professional legal education) and changes in the regulatory framework[4]
require, we argue, law graduates to be equipped with more than the
legal
knowledge and skills that are currently required for admission to
practice.
In 2010, The Australian National University
(ANU) Legal Workshop responded to these emerging challenges by
introducing the
“Professional Practice Core” (PPC) course.
Taught wholly online, the PPC is a simulated integrated
transactional
learning environment that meets the requirements of the compulsory part
of the
Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice (GDLP)[5]
qualification which allows admission to practice in Australia. However,
further
innovation is arguably being hampered by the regulatory environment we
continue
to operate in.
This paper discusses the journey legal
education has taken from first, the ‘on-the-job workplace’
space (through
Articles), second, to the ‘on
campus’ space (with formalised
teaching of law through universities) and third, to today’s
‘virtual’ space and
the concepts of distance and intimacy in this third space.
We explore the opportunities of teaching a
professional legal course wholly online (in the new virtual space) and
in doing
so we will explore the argument that our work in the transactional
online
teaching in this third space supports the need for the regulation of
legal
practice to acknowledge and embrace this third space in preparing
today’s law
graduates for the practice of law in this new era.
PROFESSIONAL LEGAL EDUCATION IN
AUSTRALIA
Professional legal education, traditionally
seen as the vocational cousin to the law degree, is not new to reviews
and
developments in the way it is taught. Every
jurisdiction in the common law world is different with regard to its
arrangements.
If we take the example of Australia, we can see traits
that are common across a number of jurisdictions.
In its infancy, legal education was
undertaken by way of an apprenticeship model (based on English
practice). Takings its roots from an old
French word, aprentis, meaning “learn”,
an apprentice refers to “a person who is learning a trade from a skilled employer,
having agreed to work for a fixed period
at low wages”
(Oxford Dictionaries). As an extension of this in the
legal context, ‘Articles’ is “a period of training
with a firm as a solicitor...” (Oxford
Dictionaries).
‘Articles’ – the very word (and its meaning)
objectifying learning as an office-based contract – were
signed and the work specified in them was undertaken within law
offices, which
was the focus of legal work for solicitors and lawyers who were not
court
lawyers. The office was the focus for
law conversations, collections of law books, bundles of law documents,
the
focus of telephone conversations, latterly the recipient and
transmitter of
faxes. The practise
of law was seen as a practical vocation and Articles was seen as a
means by way
in which lawyers were ‘educated’ to enter that vocation. Even with the establishment of the first law
schools and the movement of legal education into
the classroom space at universities in Sydney (1855) and
Melbourne (1857), the law was still taught
by practitioners in the evenings, to students who were undertaking
Articles
during the day (Collins and Webbey, 2014
and James,
2000).
By moving legal education to the
universities, the place of learning was no longer predominantly the
office – it
became the tutorial room, the law school library, the lecture theatre
(and
perhaps less commonly, a lecturer’s office and the common meeting
areas around
the law school). Education could become
more standardised in these spaces, but
less
authentic, too, in that real
law clearly was not enacted in this architecture.
In the mid-20th
century, with the
introduction of the law school curriculum and the
“casebook” created by
Christopher Columbus Langdell from the
United States,
modern Australian law schools, its curricula and pedagogy took on much
of their
current characteristics (Collins and Webbey,
2014 and
Rubin, 2012). Given the lack of reforms
in teaching methodology in law schools (at least up until only recently), it would seem that Australian law schools took Langdell’s views seriously:
“[L]aw is a
science, and...all the available materials
of that
science are contained in printed books.
If law be not a science, a university will consult its own
dignity in
declining to teach it. We
have...inculcated
the idea that the library is the proper workshop of professors and
students
alike; and that it is to us all that the laboratories of the university
are to
the chemists and physicists...” (Twining 1994 as quoted in
Collins and Webbey, 2014)
The acceptance and support of the study of
law as an academic discipline and the “professionalisation
of legal scholarship” was evident in the post-World War II era
by, for example,
the appointment of Professor Geoffrey Sawyer to the Research School of
Social
Sciences at The Australian National University in 1951. Whereas, prior
to this time,
pure research in law was not common or supported in
universities, (Bartie, 2014)
the introduction of this model contributed to the creation of the
two-tiered
model of legal education that we see in Australia today – i.e.
the divide of legal education into
two distinctly separate components: the academic
part featuring the Bachelor of Laws or Juris
Doctor;
and the professional part featuring the Graduate Diploma of Legal
Practice.
These two-tiers of legal education are
reflected in and maintained by the two-tiers of competency requirements
specified by the regulators of legal educators in relation to each of
these
components. Legal practitioners who wish
to be admitted on the roll of practitioners in the Supreme Court of
their
Australian jurisdiction need to satisfy competency requirements in both
components of legal education to become admitted lawyers.
THE ACADEMIC COMPETENCY REQUIREMENTS
In Australia, the academic
competency requirements are governed by what is colloquially referred
to as the
“Priestley 11”, named after Lancelot John Priestley, who,
in 1992, chaired the
Law Admissions Consultative Committee (LACC) of the Law Council
of Australia (LCA) and established the 11
prescribed areas of knowledge for successful completion of an
Australian law degree.
The Priestley 11 (Australian Law Council
Uniform Admission Rules, 1993) prescribed areas of knowledge are:
•
administrative law;
•
civil procedure;
•
company law;
•
contracts;
•
torts;
•
criminal law and
procedure;
•
equity (including trusts);
•
evidence;
•
property;
•
constitutional law; and
•
ethics
and professional responsibility.
These academic requirements are currently
undergoing a review and we will look at the current review in more
detail
later.
THE PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCY
REQUIREMENTS
Having undergone a (minor) review[6],
from January 2015, the competency standards for entry-level lawyers are:
Skills
•
Lawyer’s skills
•
Problem solving
•
Work management and business skills
•
Trust and office accounting
Compulsory
practice areas
•
Civil litigation
•
Commercial and corporate
•
Property law
Optional
practice areas (at least two chosen)
•
Administrative law
•
Banking and finance
•
Criminal law
•
Consumer law
•
Employment and industrial relations
•
Family law
•
Planning and environmental law
•
Wills and estate
Values
•
Ethics and professional responsibility
(LACC, 2015)
Like undergraduate legal education itself,
professional legal education (or practical legal training) also shifted
from an
‘on the job’ training through Articles
to a tertiary education, classroom-based course to now, more and more
course
providers offering online and distance options due to demand for more
flexible
study arrangements (Ferguson and Lee, 2012).
This is not unlike the shift in England,
Wales and Scotland.
Underpinning the shift in educational
practices is a concomitant shift in educational theory and values,
particularly
as they relate to the relationship between space and educational
outcomes. Thus the traditional Articles
approach
assumed that offices were the best spaces in which to learn
professionalism,
and practising lawyers provided the only
models. The disadvantages of this approach
were: the
wide diversity of quality across offices, the lack of training in
public law
offices, the problematic position of ethics learning, issues of
diversity and
social mobility across the sector. More recently, the
fluctuating legal jobs market (especially for graduates) and the rise
of a
legal business rather than legal profession model of practice left many
law
graduates without an office to complete their apprenticeship. In response, a shift of ‘space’ to
a more
tertiary based learning model was posited and accepted gratefully by
many
graduates of law from the 1970s onwards as the link between academia
and the
profession (Ferguson and Lee, 2012).
Regulators in Australia accommodated this
shift from Articles to tertiary based learning by stipulating top-down
objectives that mimicked the development of professional education as a
form of
technical education in vocational knowledge
components and in stand-alone skills. This
technicist
approach extended to the providers and was focused on the inputs of
legal
education such as the specific spaces – i.e. lecture theatres
adequate for the
required numbers, tutorial rooms, library seats, number of books held
by the
library, etc. Education itself, in terms
of its output
was not described: instead the environment – i.e. the educational
space – was
highly specified. In doing so, many of
the less tangible and more inherent qualities and attitudes required to
succeed
in practice and often evident in the “Articles”
space– such as professionalism
and work management practices – became decontextualised
and, in many cases, lost.
Gradually the learning outcomes movement
began to shape professional legal education, and regulators became more
interested in the way that education was conducted and particularly in
the
outcome of educational interventions, rather than the spaces in which
the
education was occurring. The processes
by which this came about in all jurisdictions are fascinating, though
not the
subject of this paper. However, what is relevant, is that at the same
time that
outcomes began to be specified as a desirable approach to legal
education, the
gradual evolution of the internet as an educational tool (Nardi & O’Day, 1999)
began to offer a third space for the development of professional
identity –
neither the law office nor the tutorial room, but namely, the virtual
space.
It is this third space – the virtual space
– and the use made of this space by ANU Legal Workshop’s
largest online course
the Professional Practice Core (PPC), in the Masters of Legal Practice,
that
will be explored in this paper.
THE CONTEXT OF ANU LEGAL
WORKSHOP IN THE ‘MARKET’
Professional legal education in Australia,
as in all jurisdictions, is a competitive market, and its marketisation
has an effect on its culture and modes of education.
ANU Legal Workshop is the largest
university-based provider of professional legal education (ANU Legal
Workshop
website). There are numerous other
providers in the Australian market. The
largest provider is the College of Law, a private institution
established by the
NSW Law Society (the body that represents lawyers that practice in the
State of
New South Wales – the largest cohort of lawyers in Australia) in
1973 and which
takes in approximately 3,000 students per year (College of Law website).
In addition to the College of Law and ANU
Legal Workshop, there is the Leo Cussen
Institute[7],
the Tasmanian Legal Practice Course[8],
Law Society of South Australia (jointly with the University of
Adelaide) and
numerous other university-based professional legal education providers[9].
Graduates with a law degree have freedom of
choice in where they undertake their professional legal education and
providers
must actively seek recruitment of students in a market where law
schools are
constantly being blamed for taking on too many law students, with
limited legal
jobs[10],
in a world which is changing the way in which legal services is
consumed
(Westwood 2014, Hilton and Migdal 2005,
Susskind
1996, 2000, 2008).
WHY ONLINE?
Distance education is not a modern phenomenon. Teaching and learning
outside the traditional
classroom, in some shape or form,
has been a part of education across the world and in Australia for well over a century. It is
thought the first distance education
was a short hand course taught by Isaac Pittman in 1844 by
correspondence using
what was then, the new postal system (Tait,
2003). The University College London
established its International Programme in
1858
becoming the “world’s oldest provider of distance and
flexible learning”[11]. International
Correspondence Schools (ICS) of
Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States, was established in 1891[12]. In Australia, ICS first
opened an office in
1910, although they were not formally recognised
until 1921. After a series of changes in structure, it has been known,
since
2011, as “Open Colleges”[13].
Australia’s ongoing need for distance
education is most pragmatically made by looking at geography. Australia is a large country.
Below is a graphic comparison of Australia to
Europe:
(Picture from: http://matadornetwork.com/trips/just-how-big-is-australia-anyway/)
Australia’s population is 23,711,474
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, March 2015).
Australia has 36 law schools (Council of Australian Law Deans)
and
approximately 12,000 law graduates each year (Sydney Morning Herald, 14
February 2014).
ANU College of Law (of which ANU Legal
Workshop is a significant part) is “the national law
school” (ANU College of
Law website). Being the national law
school of a nation that is as large as Australia, ANU faces a number of
challenges
(and opportunities) in providing access to legal education to all
Australians.
In
ANU Legal Workshop in particular, student in-take for the Professional
Practice
Core (PPC) within the MLP is not limited to Canberra (where ANU is
located) but
is open to students from all 36 law schools across Australia, and
beyond. Intriguingly, in a move that harks
back to
some of the earlier days of Articles, many students are already working
in or
have worked in a legal environment when they begin our course. This means that they are testing their
professional identity in our course not just against their
undergraduate
experiences, but also their experiences in a real legal environment. Students that are working are also working
very full working weeks at the same time as completing their studies. For example, when we conducted an examination
of the employment status (amongst other things) of our Winter
2013 cohort (approximately 590 students, at that time, with a response
rate of
66%) we found that:
•
81.5% say they have some
law related experience (whether employed/pro bono) and most (about
half) has
occurred in the past 3 years
•
87.4% are working in paid
employment
•
60.3% of all respondents
working in a law related areas
▪
47.9% in full time law
▪
10.3% in part time law
▪
3.8% in casual law
•
25.6% of all respondents
working in non-law related areas
▪
15.6% full time
▪
10% casual
•
15% are looking for work
•
Hours in employment:
§
Median
38 hours per week (range from 0-75 hours)
§
Peaks
at 35,40, 45 and 50 hours per week
§
63.3%
work more than 35 hours per week
These demographics of our student
population mean that our students require a flexible study environment
that
allows them to continue this work exploration, whilst recognising
that they are not the legal ‘greenhorns’ they are usually
presumed to be. At the same time, a course
must be
constructed that meets the needs of those students who have yet to have
legal
work experience and may decide to seek it whilst continuing with their
studies.
Moving online is one way of meeting this need of providing
accessibility.
However, moving online in a way that was relevant and innovative
required a
larger shift in pedagogy than simply transporting the classroom to the
digital
space. Whilst initial movements into the
digital space only involved the storage of resources and submissions of
assessments online, it is now possible to have interactive online
platforms
that allow real-time simulations, transactions, communication and
collaboration. But how has this impacted
on the ability to conceive of and encourage professional identity and
professionalism? Are there opportunities
to teach these skills in the online space?
Foley,
Holmes, Tang and Rowe wrote in 2012 that:
“Professionalism
means different things to different lawyers. For some, being
professional
denotes more than just being technically proficient in their practice
of law.
Rather, professionalism implies independent work to high standards of
ethics
and public service. But for other lawyers, the
‘traditional’ ideals of professionalism
(autonomy, collegiality, public service) have all but disappeared. Many
scholars report that a narrower, more technical view of
professionalism, which
focuses on the mastery of highly specialised
knowledge, predominates in the new, technology based, global
economy.”
Daicoff has extended the
concept of legal professionalism as related to professional identity by
suggesting that:
“Professional identity here
[means]…one’s values, preferences, passions, intrinsic
satisfactions, emotional intelligence, as well as one’s
preferred professional best practices. Emotional intelligence here is
used to
refer to five areas: intrapersonal (self) awareness, self-management
competencies, awareness of others (empathy), interpersonal relational
skills, and
drive or motivation. Many of these “professional identity”
concepts have been
empirically demonstrated to be important to one’s
effectiveness as a lawyer and to one’s
wellbeing and satisfaction as a lawyer.”
Francis (2011) extends this further by suggesting that
legal professionalism is “fragmented, heterogeneous and
fluid” and that it is
not appropriate to assume that lawyers have one approach to legal
practice at
any on point during their careers. As
with all human conditions, many factors including personality, life
approach or
external influences can impact on this identity. Yet,
Holmes et al (2012) convincingly suggest
that the construction of a law graduates professional identity will
“depend
partly on the models of ‘professionalism’ that new lawyers
encounter in their
first workplace…”
As such, if an appropriate authentic
representation of legal practice is provided in the professional legal
education virtual space, it may be possible to either provide an
alternative
professional paradigm to examine and consider for those students
already in
practice or, for those students without current professional
experience,
provide the “first workplace” experience of professionalism
for them to
consider and reflect in their own development of their identity.
The
need to include online learning is not just dictated by our student
population.
The legal industry itself is changing and much of this change can be
related to
the internet (for one, it is now often referred to as an industry
rather than a
profession). Some examples of these changes include that law firms can
now
easily source legal skill sets cheaply off shore through legal
“call centres” that deal with
discrete issues such as discovery,
standard advices, contract creation etc;
and that
many large corporate clients are becoming increasingly savvy about the
use of
legal services and put increased pressure on corporate law firms to do
more for
less by putting in place tendering process for law firms to bid for the
right
to be on one of the firms on the client’s legal ‘panel’ and
by entering into fixed matter fee arrangements (Susskind, 2008). In addition, many Australian courts now
have
electronic registry’s and file
management systems – i.e. Federal Court of Australia; and have
even put in
place self represented litigant support services to improve access to
the legal
service and in recognition of the numbers of individual clients who are
becoming wary of the value of the legal services they need and receive
due to
the growing body of information available through the internet to
support them
to deal with the law themselves (Deputy Chief Justice Faulks,
Family Court of Australia, 2013).
Beyond
this, even the form of professional communication has been shaped by
the
internet. Whereas, legal practice was
once done quite physically in the first space – i.e. the office,
the court or,
at worst, via telephone – now legal practice communications
are very often
completed in the third space via email or even web conferencing. This change creates a need for the profession
to develop and maintain new practices that extend the traditional
professional
courtesies to these digital environments.
For example, with the immediacy of the ‘send’ button
on all email communications, how do you ensure that your emails are not
riddled
with unfortunate communication errors or sentences that don’t
translate well to the typed form; and how do you craft these
communications to
ensure that the mood of the receiver of the email does not impact on
its
interpretation (Byron, 2008)? Similarly,
how do you ensure that your non-professional digital footprint
doesn’t have an
impact on your professional reputation and identity?
For example, examine the impact of Justine
Sacco’s ill-considered tweet referencing AIDS
just prior to getting on a plane headed for South Africa.
Whereas once, the thoughtless words may have
been considered unwise if uttered in the office to one or a few
colleagues, the
virility of the internet meant that it cost Ms. Sacco her job whilst
she was in
the air (Hill, 2014). To take this further, should you mention
you had a
bad day in office on your social media account?
Is it good professional practice to keep your pictures of your
well
attended and raucous 21st birthday party up for the professional world
to see? As apparently obvious as it seems,
the rise
of these issues in the internet requires a suitable response from legal
education in order to equip our graduates with all of the skills they
need to
adapt to and thrive in this rapidly changing environment (Rowe and
Murray
2014).
To this end, in 2009-10, ANU Legal Workshop
considered the innovations that were occurring in legal education to
support
simulated transactional learning (Maharg
2007), the
efficacy of sustainable assessment practices (Boud
and Falchikov, 2006), the results of
preliminary
research into the needs of lawyers starting out in the profession
(Holmes,
Rowe, Foley and Tang, 2011) and embarked on a project (the Integrated
Learning
Environment (ILE) Project) to provide professional legal education that
was not
just in the online space, but made the best use of the features of
digital
space to prepare the graduates for the realities of practice.
HOW AND WHAT WE TEACH ONLINE
In 2010, ANU Legal Workshop introduced the
Professional Practice Core (PPC) as an 18-week simulated transactional
learning
course to be taught exclusively online.
Adapted from the course developed at the University of Strathclyde (Maharg
2007), the
PPC was designed to require groups of four students
(‘firms’) using a ‘virtual
office space’ (VOS) to undertake simulated transactions in the
compulsory
competency skills areas of civil litigation, commercial and corporate
and
property practice. Trust and office
accounting, ethics and professional responsibility and practice
management
(also compulsory competency skills areas) were also integrated into the
simulated transactions of the PPC to provide the context for learning
about
these areas rather than teaching them in decontextualised
‘silos’.
The PPC is preceded by a compulsory, 5-day
face-to-face intensive course, ‘Becoming a Practitioner’
(BAP) which focused on
setting the foundation of skills in advocacy, interviewing,
negotiating, legal
writing and drafting, team work and problem-solving.
The BAP is an important course not only for
setting the foundation of legal skills but for the “accelerated
development of
trust and mutual obligation” between members of the student firms
(Rowe and
Murray, 2012). Setting this foundation
was important due to the nature of group worked involved in the PPC.
Being a course taught wholly online, we
were conscious of the importance of using relevant, accessible,
user-friendly
and flexible online platforms.
Whilst there are many reasons why this is
so important, for the purposes of this paper, we will focus on two,
namely:
•
authenticity of the
simulation; and
•
bridging
the space created by distance.
Authenticity of the simulation is important
in being able to facilitate “deeper, self-reflective and
collaborative
learning” and our desire to help students “develop a
professional identity,
equipping them to deal with the uncertainties of practice”
(Barton, McKellar
and Maharg 2007; Rowe and Murray 2012,
Foley and Tang
2014).
Despite the growing demand for more
flexible options of access to education (particularly in a country as
vast as
Australia), the negative connotation of “distance learning”
is still very real
(Bayne, Gallagher and Lamb, 2013).
In the context of the PPC, where the large
cohort of our enrolled students have obtained their law degree from a
different
institution, physically attending classes over a period of 4-5 years[14]
will, no doubt, create a sense of belonging to that institution that
our 5-day
face-to-face BAP course (the majority of which takes place in hired
commercial
venues around Australia and not on the ANU campus) together with the
online
courses, could not hope to replicate.
We are not arguing that our online
platforms (no matter how sophisticated they are) can bridge that gap in
“educational space” (Bayne, Gallagher and Lamb, 2013),
particularly in the
context of when the PPC is taught in the legal education
framework.
We do, however, argue that the space
created by distance challenges the preconceptions of territorial and
sedentary
aspects of what it means to be “at” university (Bayne,
Gallagher and Lamb,
2013); and, by doing so, throws up the opportunity to use technology to
create
innovative ways in which to bridge this gap to build a learning
community where
our online students are “at” ANU, no matter where they
physically are. We shall come back to this
point. First, however, it would be useful
to
describe the environment of the PPC.
OUR ONLINE ENVIRONMENT
The PPC is taught using two online
platforms:
•
the Web Access to Teaching
and Learning Environment (Wattle) site; and
•
the
Virtual Office Space (VOS).
Essentially, the Wattle site is the
teaching and learning site. This is the
site where:
•
conveners put up any
course-related announcements, resources and instructions for
assessments;
•
there is access to various
forums and online chat facilities to enable discussions and
web-conferences (to
communicate with the teaching staff or fellow students);
•
online individual
assessments (e.g. online quizzes) take place; and
•
majority
of the course-related administrative work is done (e.g. booking times
for oral
assessments).
Below is a screen shot of the homepage of
the PPC wattle site for our Summer
2015 course:
What we have on this homepage is an
overview of the PPC including the calendar of assessments, the course
outline
and other educational guidelines such as the academic integrity and
extension
policies.
The “Announcements” forum provides a
platform for one-way communication from the teaching staff to the
students;
general messages about the course - e.g. release of certain tasks and
relevant
deadlines.
The VOS is where all the in-role
collaborative simulation takes place.
The VOS is created to simulate a workplace desktop with:
•
access to an ‘email’
function which the firm members communicate with their
‘Associate’ or ‘Senior
Partner’ or ‘Client’;
•
tools to enable
collaborative work to take place; and
•
logs
to record their tasks (activity logs) and reflections (personal logs).
Below
is a screen shot of the VOS for our Summer
2015
course:
We have attempted to replicate the
workplace desktop with icons that will be familiar to students who are
work in
legal offices.
Whilst we provide these online platforms as
the building blocks for student collaboration and engagement, we do not
limit
students initiating and using other, external forms of virtual
collaboration
within their own firm. Examples include:
cloud storage services, Google Docs, or Dropbox
for
collaborating online; or using messaging services contained in Facebook
or
Google for immediate contact; or web conferencing facilities provided
through
Skype or FaceTime; or team project sites
such as
Asana; or team scheduling such as Whatsapp
or Outlook
to stay organised.
Indeed, students who formed groups based on their physical
proximity to
each other report they meet face-to-face on a regular basis throughout
the
entire course and of course, the usual contact methods via telephone,
email and
text messaging, are also used for discussions amongst firm members and,
to a
lesser extent, with the academic staff[15].
By providing these opportunities for
students to determine their own needs and find solutions to those needs
we are
encouraging the kinds of business solution thinking skills that go
beyond the
academic skills and knowledge developed and employed in students during
the
undergraduate or Juris Doctor Law subjects.
Furthermore, shifting the responsibility of
providing the complete virtual space from the educational provider to
the
students serves valuable psychological and pragmatic purposes. Psychologically, student wellbeing,
professionalism and engagement can be enhanced by encouraging the basic
psychological needs suggested by self-determination theory –
namely autonomy,
competence and relatedness (Ryan and Deci,
2000;
Sheldon and Krieger, 2007). Providing
the educational environment to encourage students to take
responsibility and
control their own workload and work methods is just one fundamental way
in
which we use our educational design to contribute to the fulfillment of
these
needs.
UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES OF TEACHING PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND
IDENTITY ONLINE
Influenced by Dewey’s argument that
“education arises from the interaction of a person’s
internal life and external
conditions” and that interaction is “the educative
process”, Maharg’s development
of the Graduate Diploma in Legal
Practice course at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law (GGSL) for the
virtual
world sees transactional learning as having certain key features, examples of
how we do this in the PPC as outlined below:
•
Transactional
learning is active learning: i.e. learning from
legal actions, not learning about legal actions (Maharg
2007 and Gredler 1996).
In the PPC, students, working in their firms
are required to draft a letter of advice to the client; appear
(through online chat platforms such as Wimba
or Adobe
Connect or, to a lesser extent, Skype and telephone) at an
interlocutory
application hearing; draft a claim to commence an action. While all these tasks are not unique to the
online environment, if we take, for example, the requirement to appear
at an
interlocutory application hearing in an online format, with the rise in
appearances by video link-up in Australian courts and tribunals,
learning to
communicate with judicial officers when you are not physically
appearing before
them is a real and relevant skill for today’s aspiring litigation
lawyers.
•
Learning
to do legal transactions: the PPC is an 18-week
online course. For example, throughout
the course, students conduct a property transaction from start to
completion –
taking of initial instructions from the client all the way through to
settlement and registration of title.
Being able to actively participate in this transaction
means they
see the whole of the transaction, in context.
Being online means that it enables students the freedom and
flexibility
to engage in the entirety of the transaction as and when ideas,
thoughts and
challenges hit them due to easy access, from anywhere, no matter where
they
are, as long as they have access to reliable internet.
•
Transaction
+ reflection: by incorporating a process of
“feed-forward” (Maharg 2007 and
Rowe and Murray 2014)
where students receive feedback on draft pieces of work, being required
to work
collaboratively in their firms with its natural in-built system of peer
review
and by requiring students to complete reflective written pieces by way
of
personal logs, students are able to “rise above detail, and
‘helicopter’ above
a transaction” to reflect on the transaction (Maharg
2007).
•
Collaborative
learning: throughout the entire course, students work
with “practitioner teachers” – current legal
practitioners employed as casual
academic staff to mentor students in context as
“Associate”, “Senior Partner”
(in-role) or as Practice Mentors. This
allows students to collaborate with teachers in a real-life meaningful
sense in
that they see them as mentors in practice, not as teachers in a
classroom. Our practitioner teachers are
trained to
“promote and demonstrate professionalism in all their
interactions with the
firm [of students]” (Rowe and Murray 2014) and thus students have
a foundation
of good examples that they can scaffold off.
Students also work in ‘firms’ and approximately 70%
of their work is
firm work (i.e. each firm will submit one letter, having all
contributed to its
drafting). Collaboration and peer
learning is embedded early on. During
the BAP course, students are asked to give feedback to each other as
they
undertake role plays in client interviewing, negotiating and advocacy. This opportunity for collaboration is
essential in the PPC because the majority of the work they submit is
firm
work. Collaborating (with their mentors
as well as with their peers) in an online environment reminds students
of the
necessity to remain professional while using platforms they would
normally have
considered to be a less formal setting (e.g. communicating on chat
forums or by
email compared to the formal language usually reserved by
“lawyers” in legal
letters).
•
Ethical
and professional learning: the integrated
environment of the PPC allows us to teach ethics and professional
responsibility (a compulsory competency standard) in context. In July 2012, many aspects of the
‘Giving
Voice to Values’ (GVV) curriculum (Gentile 2010) were introduced
into the
ethics component of the PPC. The
simulated transactional learning environment of the PPC lends itself
beautifully to incorporating the GVV curriculum because it teaches
students to
“recognise, clarify, speak and act on
their values
when they encounter values conflicts in their careers and
workplaces” (Rowe and
Murray 2014) by simulating situations where values conflicts may arise
and
require students to voice their values within that simulation. In the informal online environment, it is all
too easy for students to forget their professional voice.
The prevalence of acronyms such as LOL (laugh
out loud) and TTYL (talk to you later) and emoticons and emojis
are almost a given in electronic communication and having to conduct
transactions and communicate with their mentors, peers,
“Associate”, “Senior
Partner” or “Client” on these platforms reminds
students of the need to not
fall into the informality of these types of communications so much so
that it
impacts upon their professional image.
In
addition to the above factors as stated by Maharg,
based on our experiences of teaching the PPC, we would add another
feature:
•
“Just
in time” learning: the transactional
environment also removes the emphasis from pre-reading and rote
knowledge
learning, to just in time research and adaption in order to address the
specific needs of the clients and the matter.
This form of learning is more akin to the skills required to be
successful in a legal environment where the knowledge base is
constantly
adapting and developing. It also
simulates much of the uncertainty present in the practice of law, where
you
have to gain the skills and comfort to know how to research to meet the
clients’ needs in the most efficient manner possible when you can
never be
certain of the boundaries of this research or the peculiar nature of
the
clients problems that may not always be resolved only through
the law.
Ultimately,
by taking these this transactional learning environment online, it
enables the
opportunity of providing asynchronous, yet personal, engaging and
enriching
learning opportunities on a large scale.
Unlike the classroom environment where the logistics of
coordinating
significant numbers of practitioners and lay persons to play the roles
of
‘Associate’, ‘Senior Partner’ and ‘Client’
in real time would be costly and most likely prohibitive, the
integrated online
environment provides the opportunity to simulate a legal practice on a
large
scale (i.e. we currently have 850 students in the Summer 2015 course)
by
enabling both students and the practitioner teachers to engage with the
work
and provision of feedback and mentoring at times that are convenient to
them. It also enables ANU Legal Workshop
to employ currently practicing legal practitioners to work with more
than one
group of students at a time (without the students knowing that that
they are
one of many) and provide contact with the ‘real’ profession
in an individualised fashion at all times
during the course.
AUTHENTIC LEARNING
Legal education commenced its life as an apprenticeship. The concept of “learning by doing”
is not a
new one. John Dewey was a keen advocate
of experiential learning and if we apply Dewey’s theory that:
“if knowledge comes
from the impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible
to
procure knowledge without the use of objects which impress the
mind” (Dewey
1916) to law graduates, the ‘objects’ are the law office,
the documents, the
case files, the courtroom.
In 1991, Lave and Wenger theorised
the legitimacy of situated learning – where
novices become part of an established group by learning through
“legitimate
peripheral participation”; namely, that apprentices (unqualified
people are all
legitimately potential members of a “community of
practice”) observe, take on
minor and simple, peripheral tasks, and through collaboration,
engagement and
more pointedly, participation, undertake more and more harder, risky
tasks
until they become part of the established group. We
can see this theory play out in the life
of a typical private practice lawyer - going from an unqualified member
of
society, to becoming a qualified and admitted junior lawyer observing
and
undertaking simple tasks to growth into an Associate where the tasks
become
more complex and responsibilities are greater (e.g. mentoring junior
lawyers)
and to Partner, with ultimate responsibility not only for managing a
legal
practice but a law firm (i.e. a business).
In the office (i.e. the first space) where
legal education started its life, law graduates experience a certain
intimacy
with respect their chosen vocation. This
“closeness of observation or knowledge”[16]
in the office provides an intimate dimension in legal learning.
Whilst this presence in their chosen
workplace is physical and immediate, physically being at work is no
guarantee
of intimacy. Imagine a situation where a
law student undertakes a clerkship and spends most of their day working
on a
big process of discovery for one large-scale litigation matter. This process can take days, even weeks. Each day, the student’s job is to review
page
after page of discovered materials to confirm integrity of each
document (e.g.
a reference to another document which must be cross-referenced across
the
volumes of discovered material to make sure the referenced document is
there or
making sure the documents are photocopied properly and are legible). Undertaking this task, day in day out, the
student has no context about the subject matter of the legal dispute,
no
concept of why integrity of the disclosure process is important
and perhaps
essential to the legal dispute. In this
circumstance, despite being physically “at" work, can we say that
there is
intimacy – i.e. “closeness in observation or knowledge of a
subject”? We would argue not.
With the shift of legal education from the
office to the university, the vast majority of legal training occurred
away
from the office and in the second space, on campus.
In this second space, the shift of the
learning environment moves from the office to the traditional physical
set up
of the university; lecture theatres, tutorial rooms, the law library. The closeness to the real-life experience of
what it is to work in a law office is no longer present,
however, we see a shift of intimacy to the learning environment.
The professionalisation
of and the rise of the law degree as an academic discipline post World
War II
“de-emphasised the connections with
legal practice”
(James 2000).
In this space of the university, we very
much see students in their role as just that; a student.
And learning as a student has a different
culture to learning as a professional (i.e. a lawyer) (Collins and Webbey 2014).
Learning in the classroom is seen as “[t]he
pursuit of independent and original thought…[and] is a product
of individual
achievement…[and] [c]ollaborative
approaches to
learning are felt to be suspect” because the “primary
purpose is not the
development of ‘good lawyers’” (Burridge
and Webb
2007) but rather to develop “a mind which is open intellectually,
flexible and
innovative…[and] [a] ‘professional’ approach to
legal education cannot aspire
to those goals” (Boehringer 1985,
1988-1989).
Let us take, then, an example of how, in
this second space, the process of discovery is taught in the civil
procedure
course (which is taught, as per the Priestley 11 requirement) in a decontexualised silo of prescribed academic
requirement:
one or two two-hour lectures where the student is a mere spectator,
perhaps if
sufficiently interested and engaged, taking notes.
There will also be one or two tutorials to engage
in some discussions with a small group of fellow students.
At the end of the semester, there would be an
exam perhaps containing a problem-style question on the topic whereby
the
student will (having access to the prescribed text in an open-book exam
circumstance)
be afforded an opportunity to recall and articulate, in writing, what
they know
about the discovery process.
In this way of learning discovery, the
student may have all the intimacy of the educational space, but they
are
removed from the intimacy of the law office - of actually seeing a
discovered
document, of seeing in context what is relevant based on extraneous
information
and facts (e.g. the pleadings, instructions from clients, discussions
with
lawyers on the opposing side, etc).
The recent research into the wellbeing of
law students indicate that law students are not finding the study of
law as
fulfilling as they either anticipated or were hoping for
(O’Brien, Tang and
Hall 2011, Larcombe et al 2013 etc). Student
experiences through law school are
important and can have profound impacts on students.
As the Carnegie Report explained:
“law
school experiences, if they are powerfully engaging, have the potential
to
influence the place of moral values such as integrity and social
contribution
in students’ sense of self. This is
especially likely to take place in relation to the students’
sense of
professional identity, which is, of course, an important part of the
individual’s identity more broadly” (Carnegie Report at
132).
This explanation is consistent with the Law
School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) finding that students who
engaged
in volunteer pro bono work and interacted more with faculty and peers
perceived
greater professional gains during their time at law school (Silver et
al 2013).
Silver et al also reported that
“experiential learning is significant with regard to development
of values,
ethics and self awareness”.
Our shift to the virtual space allows us to
take experiential learning to a new landscape; the environment in
which, as
discussed above, we have unique opportunities to teach our students
skills to
prepare them for legal practice in this dynamic and internet-reliant
world.
There are challenges to allowing untrained
law students to learn in the real-world (Car-Chellman,
Dyer and Breman 2000, Ferry, Kervin,
Puglisi, Cambourne, Turbill,
Jonassen and Hedberg
2006);
in light of the sheer number of law graduates in Australia today,
places for
students to undertake real-life work experience is limited and there is
always
a risk that students who have yet to complete their legal education
pose to
real-life clients.
Authentic learning focuses on “real-world,
complex problems and their solutions, using role-play exercises,
problem-based
activities, case studies, and participation in virtual communities of
practice”
(Lombardi 2007).
And whilst “[s]imulation
of any type is only an approximation of reality”, there are:
“many
factors, including fidelity, equipment, psychology of the participants
(“performing for the camera,” the ability to suspend
disbelief, etc), and the environment
itself, all play crucial roles in
the realism displayed and experienced” (Hotchkiss, Biddle and Fallacaro, 2002)[17].
Maharg
states that in a simulated environment:
“…the move from
spectator to participant is crucial. It
involves not just a closer proximity to action for the actors, but
paradoxically the need to remove oneself from action and to reflect on
it, both
in advance of action and after it. The
parallel with drama is instructive” (Maharg
2007).
For many PPC students, making the shift
from a passive learner, sitting in a lecture theatre observing as the
teacher
at the front of the lecture theatre takes centre
stage, engaging in a monologue, usually to several hundred students. In this situation, the student is a
“spectator”; a spectator that has no control of the
content, the process or the
direction in which they wish to take control of their own learning.
In the PPC, students take an active part in
their learning by assuming the role of a junior lawyer, working to and
with other
participants who also have a stake in the process.
In this situation, the student is an active
participant; a participant who can respond, drive and challenge what
faces
them. Let’s take, for example, the
civil
litigation practice area in the PPC. A
firm
receives a memo from a Senior Partner in their inbox, containing
instructions
(with an attached file note of a client meeting) to draft a claim to
commence
proceedings arising out of circumstances as detailed in the file note. Driven by the requirement to meet the
educational threshold requirements, the factual scenario (as created by
the
teacher) directs the claim to one or two possible causes of action. Support is provided by way of the safe space
of the simulation and an “Associate” who is available to
provide feed-forward
or advice on possible ways forward.
However, the student firm takes charge; the members are
responsible for
accurately reading and interpreting the instructions and facts,
initiating the
appropriate research, identifying the correct cause(s) of action
(during this
process, acknowledging that there may be alternative courses of legal
action
available) and coming up with the words as they will appear on the
correct
court form of a good, solid Statement of Claim.
As Maharg points
out:
“In this sense,
while there are effective ways to educate as proven by the research, in
practice there are likely to be various ways to achieve such effective
education, since students, institutions and communities need
alternatives” (Maharg 2007).
Whilst, from an educational and competency
requirement perspective, we (as educators) guide and direct the firms
to a
specific outcome, the students have freedom to explore possible
alternative
directions: is the advice to not proceed with litigation but to
commence
negotiations or other types of dispute resolution procedures? Are there any other appropriate options
available? Because of the nature of
their role as active participant and not mere spectator, the firms have
the
ability to question, to challenge and to put forward alternate views. This part of the transactional process
creates the opportunity for “deliberate absences of information
or knowledge
[from the teacher], where student construct for themselves the
knowledge,
skills, values that no one but they can learn” (Maharg
2011).
To keep authenticity with the simulation
whilst balancing the requirement to teach competency standards, we may
respond
to the effect that the client acknowledges the advice but instructs you
to
proceed to commencing an action, thus equipping students with
information and
structure, guidance and instruction, in context, to progress the
transaction.
Once the firm determines the appropriate
cause of action and drafts their claim, it has the option to submit
their work
as a draft to their “Associate” and seek guidance, advice
and
feed-forward. This step is clearly
important for educational purposes in putting drafting skills into
context: to
focus on the process of writing rather than just the piece of work
itself;
acknowledging that legal drafting rarely happens in isolation but
rather, by
reference to and after exchanges with other documents or resources;
encouraging
drafting to be undertaken in an “informational environment”
where documents
need to not only be drafted but identified, appropriately stored and
retrieved
(Maharg 2007)[18].
Another, and for the purposes of this
paper, a more relevant reason why the feed-forward step is important is
that it
creates an environment of authenticity to the transaction.
Traditional methods of teaching drafting
skills at the undergraduate level is to remove it from the context in
which
legal drafting occurs. Students are not
permitted to collaborate or seek advice and guidance from their
teachers (save
for seeking clarification on the instructions for the task). By incorporating a feed-forward element into
the drafting process, it simulates, within the limited confines of a
course and
the teacher-student relationship, real legal drafting whereby
a junior
lawyer (or apprentice) will receive instructions from their senior
partner,
have permission to collaborate, engage with and seek guidance
from their
peers, their mentors and their senior partner, embark on independent
research
and undertake the task. The
post-submission process is also important.
In the traditional university setting of the undergraduate law
degree,
once a task is submitted, it is returned to the student with a
numerical grade
and (hopefully) commentary on where it may be improved.
In the event the task is not up to scratch,
the student receives a poor mark and that’s the end of the
process. In the context of the PPC
simulated
transaction, there is no assessment of the task by a numerical grade[19]
and the feedback allows the student to feel ‘closure’
because the senior partner
will confirm that it was of a sufficient standard to be signed and sent
out on
the firm letterhead or it will be retuned, with feedback explaining why
it may
not be up to scratch and asked for it to be re-submitted.
Importantly, the move into
the third space is not linear and not lacking in potential to create
recursive
arrangements with the first two spaces in order to create a more
complex, yet
integrated and relevant learning space to even better meets
the needs of both the legal students and the legal profession.
More
plainly, the nature of the virtual space is such that students can have
legal
experience jobs whilst completing their studies – as many of our
students
already do – and this creates the ultimate opportunity for legal
education in
the third space to become more supportive of the students lived
experiences in
practice. For example, if you are learning skills about how to
act in
accordance with your ethics/values in practice, the importance of such a skills is likely to be more explicit if
you have
an experience of legal practice to benchmark your professional
development
experiences against. Similarly, the reflective potential created
by
providing students with the opportunity in the digital educational
space to
compare, reflect and understand their current legal practice
environment may
form the basis for the more efficient creation of reflective
practitioners
(Leering 2014) and to counteract the potential impacts of a
graduate’s first
place on negative ethical professional identity creation (Holmes,
Foley, Tang
and Rowe 2012).
If we see our role as
educating law students to produce lawyers that are “fit to
practice” (Westwood
2014), it is essential to expose our students to these types of
challenging situations,
to ensure they are “skilled in making complex decisions in the
circumstances of
particular situations” (Westwood 2014 referring to Maister
1997, Rhode 2000, Empson 2007, Galanter
2011), in the scope of the simulation because:
“Experience
is the result, the sign, and the reward of that interaction of organism
and
environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation
of
interaction into participation and communication” (Dewey
1969-91 “Later Works”).
BRIDGING THE DISTANCE
One common criticism that ANU Legal
Workshop faces about the PPC, from proponents of the traditional
face-to-face
method of teaching, is that online teaching lacks the relevant
connection
between teacher and student.
At the Australasian Professional Legal
Education Council (APLEC) conference in 2012, during a presentation on
how we
teach professional legal skills online, a comment was made (drawing an
example
from likening professional legal skills to learning tennis) that it is
all very
well to see someone hit a tennis ball, but it’s not the same as
hitting the
tennis ball yourself. This comment
demonstrated the lack of understanding of the simulated transactional
nature of
the way the PPC is taught. The commenter
misunderstood our teaching of professional legal skills online to the
way in
which undergraduate silo subjects are usually taught - namely through
face-to-face lectures and tutorials with lecture recordings and slides
being
made available on an educational website such as Blackboard or Moodle.
Unfortunately, such misunderstandings are often based on a very rose-coloured version of what undergraduate legal
education
actually looks like in today’s environment, but whilst they
prevail, there will
be restrictions on providers’ abilities to innovate in the online
environment.
As argued by Bayne, Gallagher and Lamb,
physically being “at” university is no guarantee of
bridging distance. At a recent BAP course
(January 2015 Sydney
course), one student commented that because
they had
undertaken their entire undergraduate law degree by distance, the five
days of
face-to-face teaching was valuable because they felt a “real
connection”. This was so even though
the course was
conducted at a commercial premises in
Sydney, almost
300km from the physical campus of the ANU.
We also see this connection in students electing to get student
cards
(despite the fact that practically, there is no real use for a student
card off
campus as it is primarily used for after-hours access to computer labs
or to
physically borrow books from the library) or electing to attend their
graduation ceremony at ANU to receive their award of the GDLP as the
“‘single
present centre’ around which the
multiple ‘absences’
of the distance student could be anchored in a single moment of rival
through
graduation” (Bayne, Gallagher and Lamb 2014) or by electing to
become admitted
as a lawyer in the ACT Supreme Court and travelling with their family
to
Canberra (where the ANU campus is situated) for the admission ceremony,
a lot
of these students also asking ANU academic staff to move their admission[20]. We would argue that these
efforts by students
(many of whom have never physically ever been on the ANU campus) show they “strongly locate themselves in term of
‘course’ and its
community, rather than ‘institution’” (Bayne,
Gallagher and Lamb 2014) and
that:
“a network topology
might be read as being enacted for the university, in which proximity
is not
measurable in terms of geographical distance, or authenticity indicated
by the
immanence of the campus, but university space is rather to do with
‘the network
elements and the way they hang together’” (Bayne, Gallagher
and Lamb 2014
referring to Mol and Law 1994).
We do not pretend that these anecdotes
provide irrefutable proof for the romantic notion that all MLP students
find a
connection to ANU. Given the nature of the MLP (namely that it is a
professional legal education course which takes place over a period of,
usually, 6-9 months after 4-5 years of an undergraduate law or Juris Doctor degree most likely at another
institution),
and that the majority of our students juggling the course with other
commitments, we acknowledge that a vast proportion of our students may
feel no
physical connection with ANU. What we
are, however, arguing, is that, as Bayne, Gallagher and Lamb found in
their
study of distance students at Edinburgh, it is not unusual for students
to feel
connected to the ANU community notwithstanding their lack of physical
contact
with the campus.
Another common criticism that ANU Legal
Workshop faces about the PPC is its focus on group or teamwork. Holzweiss and ors (2014) quote Rovai
(2004) in
stating that “online courses should contain a blend of peer
interactions and
individual assignments to help balance the independent and
collaborative
creation of knowledge”. As outlined
above, the PPC course work is undertaken by students in firm teams or
groups
(of usually 4 but sometimes 3 or 5 students) who pool their experiences
and
knowledge and support for each other in order to compete
the simulated transactions online. In
doing so, they also are able to practise
the skills
that are often more difficult to simulate in a
classroom/individualistic-only
environment – i.e. time, file and risk management as well as
project management
of a legal team in a courteous and professional manner to meet the
needs of a
client. Yet, the balance between firm
and individual is maintained, as the students still need to complete
individual
assessments that tie into their simulated transactions to ensure that
they can
be individually warranted for practice, and their individual
contributions to
the success of the team are recognised
through an
individual grade for their developed and demonstrated professionalism
in
practice.
It is arguable that the balance achieved
between group and individual work and the PPC is effective. For
example, in our
previous referenced survey of our Winter
2013 cohort
we asked the students both at the beginning and end of the PPC what
their
attitudes and expectations of group work were.
From the beginning to the end of the PPC we found a
statistically
significant:
•
increase
in agreement with the statements that ‘I’m looking forward
to working in a team
in the PPC/I enjoyed working in my team’; and
•
decrease
in agreement with the statements that “I’ll encounter/I
encountered problems
when working with my team”
Bayne et al’s
argument that distance students align and focus themselves in the
context of
the ‘course’ and its community is demonstrated through the
group learning in
the PPC. The majority of the student
firms are located in the same city and some choose to meet face-to-face
on a
regular basis. In this way, none of them
may have any physical connection to ANU (and their teachers), but they
find a
physical connection to each other and despite challenges of working
together
over an 18-week period, they are supported and encouraged to adapt, be
flexible, resilient and learn professional ways in which to collaborate
and
give and receive feedback from their peers.
As Collins and Webbey stated,
“[s]tudents of a
‘perfectionist’ dispassion had to adapt and
make the shift from ‘being right’ towards ‘exercising
judgment’” within the
“constraints of time and resources”.
Collins and Webbey further argue
that the PPC
supports an “elevated dynamic of learning, with shifting
expectations of
students moving from dependence towards independence, and from
simplicity
toward complexity”.
Another way in which we attempt to bridge
the distance in the PPC is by use of reflective journals within the
“Professionalism in Practice” (PiP)
component of the
course. Online reflections incorporate
many different dimensions in the learning environment.
The majority of our students are considered
“Generation Y” (or younger) and social media and web
preference is a natural
part of their lives and accordingly:
“[o]nline reflective
writing in education, whether publicly
visible, limited to small groups of learners, or restricted to just a
student
and their teacher, is profoundly influenced by wider cultural
understandings of
blogging and personal disclosure and risk online” (Joss 2010).
In the simulated transactional platform of
the VOS where students are “Junior Lawyers” who work to and
with “Associates”
and “Senior Partners”, they take on that persona and act
accordingly - i.e. in
a professional and cordial manner. In
the realm of the PiP course, they are
themselves and
they work with a dedicated Practice Mentor.
There are no roles being adopted and both the teacher (the
Practice
Mentor) and the student are vulnerable in that they are interacting as
themselves, they are discussing and questioning issues of
professionally (and
perhaps personal) sensitivity but outside of the environment of social
media,
an environment which a lot of students may feel more comfortable.
Ross states:
“We can see in
current blogging practices a convergence of the rise of the concept of
personal
branding (Peters 1997, Lair et al 2005), and what Scott describes as
the
“cultural tendency to seek out confessional narratives of
self-disclosure”
(2004, 92). This convergence exposes a
number of tensions between moral panics around privacy and safety and a
growing
sense that online invisibility equates to personal and professional
negligence,
and that the more presence the better” (Ross 2010).”
When students are being asked to complete
reflective journals which are, in essence, being graded, it is not
surprising
that there would be a tension between authenticity and an unnatural
effort to
come across like they are truly “reflecting” (i.e.
demonstrating, through
words, that they have “learnt” something), because
“in contrast to the notion
of authenticity and the associated riskiness of online disclosure, the
web is a
medium which facilitates deception” although the “appearance
of
authenticity remains extremely important” (emphasis added) (Ross
2010).
The differentiation in the teacher/student
relationship and the Senior Partner/Junior Lawyer relationship is also
evident. In an incident during one 2010
course, one firm member commented on Facebook that their opposing firm
were
“retards”, without realising
that a member of the
opposing firm was one of their “friends” on Facebook. Having seen the disparaging comment, the
opposing firm retaliated by bringing it to the attention of their
Practice
Mentor. Whilst any attempts to address
this issue with the firm member which posted the remark were met with
resistance (to the effect that what happens on social media is outside
of the
relevance for the teacher/student relationship), when the comment was
referred
to in role by the “Senior Partner” for unprofessional
conduct, the “Junior
Lawyer’s response was much more apologetic and reflective. This incident was a stark reminder of the
different persona that students take on in the simulated transactional
learning
environment, because whilst they may be more confident in challenging a
teacher’s observations about the unprofessional nature of their
conduct, the
“Senior Partner’s negative observations about their conduct
had much more
impact. This willingness to engage with the simulation and to treat it
as
authentic, whilst not an attempt to be reality (Collins and Webbey
2014 and Maharg 2011), is further
demonstrated when
we receive requests to pass on messages to the fictional characters,
“Senior
Partner” or “Associate” because ‘we
haven’t supplied telephone numbers for
them.’
Unfortunately, whilst a majority of our
students appear to be gaining benefits from this model of simulated
legal
practice for the development of professional skills in the “third
space”, some
of what we are able to achieve is still somewhat restricted by the
regulatory
environment.
THE CURRENT REGULATORY
ENVIRONMENT AND THE NEW VIRTUAL SPACE
Despite the challenges faced by today’s law
graduates in learning to navigate legal practice in the virtual era,
the
regulation of legal education is (still) governed by the requirement to
master
stand-alone skills and prescriptive areas of knowledge.
The result is a challenge faced by
providers of professional legal education in attempting to balance
competing
pressures – on the one hand, teaching the required competencies
using platforms
that are accessible and competitive in a fierce marketplace, and on the
other,
a real necessity to equip today’s law graduates with the skills,
knowledge and
understanding of developing their professional identity - that is, to
produce
lawyers that are “ready to practice” (Westwood 2014) and
committed to “lifelong
learning” (Westwood 2014 and
Schein 1972).
In Australia, there are admitting
authorities in each State and Territory[21].
AUSTRALIAN PLT COMPETENCY STANDARDS REVIEW
The PLT Competency Standards were reviewed
between 2010 and 2013 as a result of jurisdictional differences across
Australia in the way law graduates were able to get admitted[22].
When we compare the Competency
Standards
before and after, it is difficult to see how much has been reformed:
•
addition of a new elective
area of knowledge, Banking and Finance;
•
removal of the two columns
of elective subjects[23];
•
addition of ‘self
management’ under the Work Management and Business Skills[24];
•
minor
changes to specific task-based requirements within the areas of
knowledge (e.g.
the need to learn double-entry bookkeeping has now been removed from
the Trust
and Office Accounting compulsory area of knowledge).
Prior to this review (and commencement of its
changes in January 2015), these
standards
were basically unchanged since their introduction in 1999, arising out
of Proposed
Uniform Practical Legal Training Requirements
which was published in 1993.
AUSTRALIAN ACADEMIC REQUIREMENTS “LIMITED
REVIEW”
The Priestley 11 academic requirements are
currently undergoing a (in its own description a “limited”)
review. The Discussion
Paper
“reviewed…developments [in both theory and practice] in
the USA, England and
Scotland prior to February 2010” in the context of the LACC
Competency
Standards for Entry Level Lawyers and also as a result of the
development of
Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) for the Bachelor of Laws[25]
which aspire that a law student should:
“not
only acquire a substantive body of knowledge during a law course (to
which the
Academic Requirements have so far been primarily directed) but should
also
acquire the intellectual skills and personal attribute that are
necessary to
process and deploy that knowledge. For
this reason, in addition to specifying particular expectations for
Knowledge,
the TLOs also set expectations relating to Ethics and Professional
Responsibility, Thinking Skills, Research Skills, Communication and
Collaboration, and Self-Management.”
LACC specifically notes that it considered
the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) Report and we will come
to the
recommendations arising out of the LETR Report later.
The shift “from a focus on prescribed courses
to the outcomes of educational and training” was not without
criticism in
England (which we will discuss later).
LACC does not seek any debate with respect
to the following academic requirements of knowledge:
•
Administrative Law
•
Contract
•
Criminal Law
•
Equity
•
Federal and State
Constitutional Law
•
Property
•
Torts.
It does, however, seek consultations on
whether or not the following academic requirements of knowledge should
be
compulsory:
•
Civil Procedure
•
Company Law
•
Evidence
•
Ethics
and Professional Responsibility.
LACC again, specifically refers to the
English model in support of why it is raising the question mark over
the above
four (currently compulsory) knowledge areas.
The other question that it asks is whether
statutory interpretation should be included as a prescribed academic
requirement.
Submissions were sought (to be submitted by
31 March). As at the time of writing
this paper, there were four submissions made to LACC:
•
The
Honourable
Brian Sully QC
who emphatically disagrees that the above four knowledge areas should
be
omitted from the compulsory academic requirements;
•
Hwee
Cheng Goh
who submits that Ethics and Professional Responsibility (including
basic trust
accounting) should remain a compulsory academic requirement;
•
The Honourable
J C Campbell QC who submits that company
law and statutory interpretation should be made compulsory but that
certain
aspects of civil procedure, evidence and ethics and professional
responsibility
should be made compulsory but as a whole subject does not need to be
compulsory
academic requirements; and
•
The
Council
of Australian Law Deans
(CALD), which does not support any aspects of the limited review.
What we see in both the discussion paper
and the submissions made to LACC, to date, is
an absence
of competency standards outside of the silos of knowledge and skills to
be
mastered. The discussion paper’s
main
issue is with respect to whether four of the current compulsory
required
knowledge areas should be removed as a compulsory requirement. The submissions (in a large part because they
are in direct response to the discussion paper) also make judgment
calls about
whether the knowledge areas should stay or go.
If we look at how England and the US (given
that LACC itself acknowledges it considered developments in these
countries in
its own review), do they tell us anything different?
We explore these below.
LETR REPORT
A joint project of the
Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), the Bar Standards Board (BSB)
and ILEX
Professional Standards (IPS), the Legal Education and Training Review
(LETR)
“constitutes a fundamental, evidence-based review of education
and training
requirements across regulated and non-regulated legal services in
England and
Wales” (LETR website).
As raised above, the shift “from a focus on
prescribed courses to the outcomes of educational and training”
in England was
met with concerns of “loosening of the vocational stage
requirements and the
possible marginalisation of the year long
Legal
Practice Course…[which] threatened the professional standards of
solicitors”
(Boon, Flood and Webb 2005). Although we
do not believe that some of the factors which drove the LETR in England
exist
in Australia[26],
factors such as growing specialisation of
legal
practice, internationalisation,
commodification of
legal education (Boon, Flood and Webb 2005 and Thornton 2011) are very
real and
relevant to the Australian context.
Paragraph 3.59 of the LETR Report
acknowledges that “activity-based” and
“outcomes-focused” regulation will shake
things up in the current regulatory environment and that regulators
will need
to ensure that consistent and necessary competency standards are met
whilst
maintaining the balance of the risks of allowing competition around
those
standards.
An interesting aspect of the LETR Report is
the discussion around regulation by title, activity and entity.
In Australia, like in England, regulation
by title is the most common (e.g. solicitors are regulated by the
various State
and Territory-based law societies, barristers are regulated by the
various
State and Territory-based bar associations, etc)
and,
as the LETR Report states, can be “double-edged” in that
titles can “provide
value by offering some assurance of quality” on the one hand,
however, on the
other hand, “by definition they restrict access to a field of
work and thus
potentially restrict competition”. We
see this in Australia in a variety of different ways, one of the most
common
being the limited access to work for barristers in the absence of an
instructing solicitor.
Whilst regulation by activity can provide
potential benefits as outlined in paragraph 5.7 of the LETR Report[27],
the key question will boil down to how the “nature and range of
activities” are
defined and that the proper way of looking at this type of regulation
is to
consider it in the context of a “field of competence”. The example of the activity of will writing[28]
as outlined in paragraph 5.10 is illustrative of the potential risks of
activity-based regulation.
Entity regulation is a relatively new
dimension and whilst it “fits well in the current
environment”, it is “relatively
untested”. This kind of regulation
seems to have come
about in England as a result of the rise of lawyers practising
in Alternative Business Structures (ABSs) and acknowledges that “organisational infrastructures, processes and
cultures are
significant in influencing the competent and ethical behaviour
of employees or members”[29].
The shift of professional legal education
in Australia to this virtual space is a result of a number of different
factors:
•
the physical distance and
remoteness of Australia resulting in a demand for more access to
professional
legal education;
•
the growing normality of
communicating and undertaking regular business (including access to
high-level
education) online;
•
the changing demographic
of our students who are juggling full-time work, personal commitments
and study
demanding more flexible options for professional legal education;
•
the globalisation
of legal education and legal services requiring more technological
savvy ways
in which to conduct professional business (including providing
professional
legal education) online; and
•
technological
innovations resulting in more sophisticated ways to provide high
quality
education online.
With this change in the way we conduct
ourselves in the professional legal market (from legal education to
conducting
legal transactions), and notwithstanding stating that it has reviewed
the
review undertaken by LETR in England and Wales, the review of the Entry
Level
Lawyers Competency Standards undertaken by LACC do not seem to have
taken into
consideration the three different types of regulation that LETR have
discussed.
What we see in the LACC review, including
its current review of the academic requirements, is an ongoing
acceptance of
the decontexualised silo method of
requiring
competence in specific areas of knowledge and skills in a regulatory
environment in the context of title. The
current graduate job market for Australian law graduates[30]
indicates that we will see law graduates pushing the boundaries of what
their
traditional career path will take. What
we foreshadow is a push for employers seeking law graduates that stand
out;
that have something in addition to a qualification to be a solicitor;
that
extra something. A competency standard
taking into consideration the three different types of regulation as
discussed
in the LETR Report is, we would argue, a good start.
Being admitted as a solicitor (i.e. title
regulation) is, in the current Australian law graduate job market, a
given. Being competent in certain and
specific areas
of law (knowledge and skills) is essential and with the inclusion of
the new
requirement for “self-management” as per the January 2015
Entry Level Lawyer
Competency Standards is an example of how the recent research in
Australia on
law student wellbeing and the need to ensure law graduates are equipped
with
skills to manage themselves to be professional, ethical professionals,
is a
good start to incorporating activity based competencies.
We would also argue that entity regulation is
one-way regulators can place some responsibility on employers for the professionalising of young lawyers.
The concept of flexibilisation
as discussed by Boon, Flood and Webb is very relevant to the PPC and
the MLP
course in general. The move from
“traditional ‘just-in-case’ general intellectual
development to more flexible
‘just-in-time’…and ultimately
‘just-for-you’ learning” describes one of the
fundamental factors of why the PPC was developed as a purely online
course. In marketing the course, a big
draw card for potential students is the flexible nature of the course
which
means that the course can be tailored “just-for-you” (i.e.
students can work
from anywhere in the world as long as they have a reliable internet
connection;
time is no barrier as teachers are available in the mornings, evenings
and
weekends, outside of the traditional work hours).
Boon, Flood and Webb argue that “moving to
technical, flexible education would permit [the Law Society] control
over the
occupation’s members by virtue of the regulatory capture”
(Boon, Flood and Webb,
2005). In a global market where
traditional legal services are provided by more than lawyers, it raises
the
question as to the proper role of the regulators of lawyers.
THE REGULATORY APPROACH IN AMERICA
In the United States of America there is
increasing pressure on the regulatory authorities – primarily the
American Bar
Association – and the Law Schools to address the inequities of
legal education
in American law schools, including the rapidly declining job prospects,
the
cost of access to the education, the lack of access to justice by the
community, the lack of acknowledgement of impact of the changes in
technology
on legal services and the failure of the many aspects of legal
education to
produce practice ready and psychologically well professionals for
practice
(Stuckey, et al, 2007; Sullivan et al, 2007; Krieger, 2011; Sheldon and
Krieger, 2007; Krieger and Sheldon, 2015; Henderson, 2013). Most profoundly this pressure is seen in the
reductions of applications for law school positions and court cases
relating to
misrepresentation of law school graduate job prospects.
In response, the ABA’s Taskforce into the
Future of Legal Education (January 2014) commented that the
‘system of legal
education would be better with more room for different models. Variety
and a
culture of encouraging variety would facilitate innovation in programs
and
services; increase educational choices for students; lessen status
competition;
and aid the adaptation of schools to changing market and other external
conditions.’ As part of the Taskforce recommendations there is an
increasing
emphasis on the need to provide the space for law schools to respond to
the
market needs creatively – for example:
•
“There
Should be Greater Heterogeneity in Programs that Deliver Legal
Education;
•
There
Should be clear recognition that Law Schools Exist to Develop
Competencies
Relating to the Delivery of Legal and Related Services;
•
There
Should be Greater Innovation in Law Schools and in Programs that
Deliver Legal
Education;
•
Specifically, the
taskforce highlights a number of Standards and Interpretations set by
the ABA
as relating to distance education (i.e. Standard 306) and faculty
requirements
(i.e. Standard 403) and minuted attended
requirements
(i.e. Standard 304(b) and recommended that the ABA ‘Eliminate or
Substantially
Moderate the Restrictiveness of Standards, Interpretations and Rules
that
Directly or Indirectly [Raise the Cost or] Impede Law School Innovation
in
Delivering a J D Education without Commensurately Contributing to the
Goal of
Ensuring that Law Schools Deliver a Quality Education.”
One of the seemingly obvious ways in which
the issues of access and creativity could be addressed would be to
provide the
environment for law schools to explore the “third space” to
respond to the
needs of the students for experiential, accessible and cheaper legal
education
models. Despite this, at present (as represented by the
Taskforce’s
recommendations) the ABA’s approach to the question of allowing Juris Doctor courses to enter the third space is
to create
a requirement of the limited numbers of hours that can be done online
(at a
distance) and to require Colleges to put in exemption requests in order
to
exceed these limited hours. The
exemption process in these terms shifts the focus of an application
from the
learning outcomes and innovations that can be achieved in a particular
learning
space to simply whether the learning space will be allowed. Thus, this
process
has the potential of shifting the emphasis away from creatively meeting
the
learning needs of both the students and the profession to simply
describing the
inputs of the education model – i.e. like the old form of
regulation according
to the size of the lecture room and lecturer/student.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have discussed the shift
in professional legal education from an on-the-job space (the first
space)
through Articles, to the tertiary education space of the classroom (the
second
space) to the virtual space (the third space).
The regulators responded to the shift from the first space to
the second
space, by developing competency standards that require the teaching of
knowledge and skills in decontextualised
silos. Whilst the introduction of the
second space
may have found this type of top-down linear requirement of learning
useful (and
perhaps even required it given the space of the lecture theatre,
tutorial rooms
and the law library), the changes in the nature of our law student
cohorts and
the legal services industry require a more creative imagining of the
possibilities of the virtual third space to achieve relevant legal
education
outcomes.
However, despite both the practical legal
skills and academic competency requirements undergoing reviews
relatively
recently in Australia, England and Wales and the United States of
America, the
regulators do not seem to have responded by creating opportunities to
creatively consider the teaching of professional legal skills in the
third
space. In examining the way in which ANU
Legal Workshop has innovated in order to provide an authentic,
integrated and
collaborative simulated legal practice environment online for the PPC
in this
paper, we table just one successful possibility for online simulated,
transactional learning to meet the needs of the future legal profession
should
some of the recommended regulatory changes be made.
Furthermore, we raise the possibility that a
more complete move into the virtual space provides unique opportunities
to
teach our law graduates skills that go beyond the minimum competency
standards
as they currently stand.
REFERENCES
American Bar Association (January
2014) Taskforce into the Future of Legal Education: http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/professional_responsibility/report_and_recommendations_of_aba_task_force.authcheckdam.pdf
Andrew, F, (2011) ‘At the Edge of Law:
Emergent and Divergent Models of Legal Professionalism’, Ashgate, Vol 1
Australian Bureau of Statistics, March
2015
Bartie, S, (2014) ‘Towards a history of law as an
academic
discipline’, Melbourne University
Law Review (2014) 38(2)
Barton, K, McKellar, P, and Maharg,
P, (2007) ‘Authentic fictions: simulation, professionalism
and legal learning’, Clinical Law Review, Vol
14: 143
Bayne, S., Gallagher, M., and Lamb,
J., (2013) ‘Being ‘at’ university: the topologies of
distance studies’,
Higher Education, 2013
Boehringer, G., (1988-89) ‘Resisting Pearce: the significance
of the
review of Macquarie Law School – the role of Macquarie’s
progressiveness’, 5 Australian
Journal of Law and Society 93
Boon, A., Flood J.,
and Webb, J., (2006), ‘Postmodern professions? The fragmentation of
legal education and the legal profession’ (2006) 14/(4)
Legal Education Digest 3
Boud, D. and Falchikov, N.,
(2006)
‘Aligning Assessment with long-term learning, Assessment and
Evaluation’ 31 Higher
Education 399, 402: http://www.numyspace.co.uk/~unn_evdw3/skills/current/papers/assess1.pdf
Burridge, R., and Webb, J., (2007) ‘The value of common law
legal
education rethinking rules, responsibilities, relationships and roles
in the
law school’, 10(1) Legal Ethics, 72-97
Byron, K (2008) ‘Carrying Too Heavy A
Load? The Communication and Miscommunication of Emotion by
Email’, Academy
of Management Review 2008, Vol. 33, No. 2, 309–327
Car-Chellman,
A., Dyer, D., and Breman, J., (2000)
‘A comparison of
collaborative learning and audience awareness in two components –
mediated
writing environments’, Association for Educational
Communication and
Technology
Council of Australian Law Deans: http://www.cald.asn.au/slia/lawschools.php
Collins, C., and Webbey,
S., (2014) ‘Collaboration: a crucible for cultivating common
understanding in
professional legal education’, Chapter 7, The Calling of Law: the pivotal role of vocational legal
education, Emerging Legal
Education Series, Ashgate, Westwood, F.,
and Barton,
K., (ed)
Daicoff, S. S., (2014) 'Lawyer, Form Thyself: Professional
Identity
Formation Strategies in Legal Education, Professional Responsibility,
and
Experiential Courses': http://ssrn.com/abstract=2530736
Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M., (2000) ‘The
"what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the
self-determination of behavior’ Psychological Inquiry,
11, 227-268
Deputy Chief Justice Faulks
(2013) SELF-REPRESENTED LITIGANTS: TACKLING THE
CHALLENGE Managing People in Court, Conference National Judicial
College of
Australia and the Australian National University February 2013: http://njca.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Justice-Faulks.pdf
Dewey, J., Democracy and Education,
1916
Dewey, J., 1969
Ferguson, A., and Lee, E., (2012)
"Desperately Seeking ... Relevant Assessment? A Case Study on the
Potential for Using Online Simulated Group Based Learning to Create
Sustainable
Assessment Practices" 22 (1) Legal Education Review 121
Ferry, B., Kervin,
L., Puglisi, S., Cambourne, B., Turbill,
J., Jonassen, D., and Hedberg,
J., (2006) ‘Online classroom simulatioin:
using a
virtual classroom to support pre-service teacher thinking’, Authentic
learning environments in higher education, Herrington, T., and
Herrington,
J. (ed)
Foley, T., and Tang, S., (2014) ‘The
practice of law and the intolerance of certainty’ (2014) 37(3) University
of
New South Wales Law Journal 1198
Gentile, M.C., (2010) ‘Giving Voice to
Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right’, Yale
University
Press
Gredler, M.E., (1996) ‘Educational games and simulations:
a
technology in search of a (research) paradigm’, Handbook of
research for
educational communications and technology, MacMillan, Jonassen,
D.H. (ed)
Henderson, W. D., (2013) ‘A Blueprint
for Change Pepperdine Law Review’, Vol. 40, No. 2, p. 461;
Indiana Legal
Studies Research Paper No. 230. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2202823
Hill, K., (2014) ‘Justine Sacco's
Nightmare Before
Christmas, Twitter-Version’: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/21/justine-saccos-nightmare-before-christmas-twitter-version/ 2014
Hilton, T., and Migdal,
S., (2005) ‘Why clients need, rather than want, lawyers’ International
Journal of the Legal Profession, Vol
12(1)
Holmes, V., Foley, T., Tang, S., and
Rowe, M., 'Practising Professionalism:
Observations
from an Empirical Study of New Australian Lawyers ' (2012) 15(1) Legal
Ethics 29
Holzweiss, P., Joyner, S.,M Fuller, Henderson, S., and Young, R.,
(2014) ‘Online graduates students’ perceptions of best
learning experiences’, Distance
Education Vol. 35 Issue 3
Hotchkiss, M., Biddle, C., and Fallacaro,
M.D., (2002) ‘Assessing the authenticity of the
human simulation experience in anaesthesiology’,
American Association of Nurse Anaesthetists
Journal 70(6):470-473, 2002
James, N.J., (2000) ‘A brief history
of critique in Australian legal education’ (2000) 24(3) Melbourne University Law Review 965
Krieger, L., and
Sheldon, K., Lawrence S., (2015) ‘What Makes Lawyers Happy? Transcending the Anecdotes with Data from 6200
Lawyers’ The
George Washington University Law Review, Vol. 83: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2398989,
Krieger, L.S., (2011) ‘The
most ethical of people, the least ethical of people:
proposing self-determination theory to measure professional character
formation’ (2011) 8 University of St Thomas Law Review 168;
Legal Admissions Consultative
Committee (LACC) (1 January 2015) Practical Legal Training (PLT)
Competency
Standards for Entry-Level Lawyers: http://www1.lawcouncil.asn.au/LACC/images/pdfs/LACCCompetencyStandardsforEntryLevelLawyers-Jan2015.pdf
Larcombe, W., Malkin, I., and
Nicholson,
P., (2012) ‘Law students’ motivation, expectations and
levels of psychological
distress: evidence of connections’, 22 Legal Education Review
71-98,
2012
Larcombe, W., Fethers, K., (2013)
‘Schooling the blues? An
investigation
of factors associated with psychological distress among law
students’, 36 University
of New South Wales Journal 390-436, 2013
Larcombe, W., Tumbga, L., Malkin, I., Nicholson, P., and Tokatlidis,
O., (2013) ‘Does an improved experience of law school protect
students protect
students against depression, anxiety and stress? An
empirical study of wellbeing and the law
school experience of LLB and JD students’, 35 Sydney Law
Review 407-432,
2013
Lave, J., and Wenger, E., (1991) Situated
learning: legitimate peripheral
participation, Cambridge 1991
Law Council of Australia (1993)
Appendix A: Uniform Admission Rules 1993: http://www1.lawcouncil.asn.au/LACC/images/pdfs/UniformAdmissionRules1993.pdf
Leering, M., (2014) ‘Conceptualizing
reflective practice for legal professionals’ Journal of Law
and Social
Policy 23 (2014)
Lombardi, M., (2007) ‘Authentic
learning for the 21st century: an overview’, Educause
Learning Initiative paper 1: 2007, Oblinger,
D., (ed)
Maharg, P., (2007) ‘Transactional learning in
action’, Transforming
Legal Education: learning and teaching the law in the early
twenty-first
century, Ashgate, 2007
Nardi, B., and O’Day, V.,
(1999)
‘Information ecologies: using technology with heart’,
Cambridge, MIT Press
O’Brien, M., Tang, S., and Hall, K.,
(2011) ‘No time to lose: negative impact on law student wellbeing
may begin in
year one’, International Journal of the First Year in Higher
Education, vol 2, 2012
Oxford Dictionaries
Ross, J., (2010) ‘Just what is being
reflected in online reflection?: new literacies for new media
practices’ 7th
International conference on networked learning, Dirckinck-Holmfeld,
L., Holdgson, V., Jones, C., de Laat,
M., McConnell, D., and Ryberg, T., (ed)
Rovai, A.P., and Jordan, H.M., (2004) ‘Blended learning
and sense
of community: a comparative analysis with traditional and fully online
graduate
courses’, The International Review of Research in Open and
Distance Learning,
Vol 5, No 2
Rowe, M., and Murray, M., (2014)
‘Teaching professionalism online – an Australian
professional legal education
experience’, The Calling of Law, Ashgate,
Westwood, F., and Barton, K., (ed)
Rubin, E., (2014) ‘Legal Education in
the digital age’, Cambridge, 2014
Ryan, D., and Deci,
E.L., (2000) ‘Self-determination theory and the facilitation of
intrinsic
motivation, social development, and wellbeing’, American Psychologist, 55, 68-78, Anderson, N., (ed)
Schein, E., (1972) `Professional
education: some new directions‘ McGraw-Hill, 1972
Sheldon, K., and Krieger, L., (2007)
‘Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law
Students: A
Longitudinal Test of Self-Determination Theory’, 33 Personality
and social
psychology bulletin 883
Silver, C., Rocconi,
L., Haeger, H., and Watkins, L., (2013)
‘Gaining from
the system: lessons from the law school survey of statement engagement
about
student development in law school’, University of St Thomas
Law Review, 2013
Stuckey, R., et al, (2007) ‘Best
Practices for Legal Education: a vision and a road map, Clinical
Legal
Education Association, 2007
Sullivan W.M., et al, (2007) ‘A Vision
and Road Map: Educating Lawyers — Preparation for the Profession
of Law’, Jossey-Bass, (‘The
Carnegie Report’), 2007
Susskind, R., (1996) ‘The
future of law: facing the challenges of information
technology’, Oxford University Press, 1996
Susskind, R., (2000) ‘Transforming the
law: essays on technology, justice and the legal marketplace’, Oxford
University Press, 2000
Susskind, R., (2008)
‘The end of lawyers? Rethinking the nature of
legal services’, Oxford
University Press, 2008
Sydney Morning Herald (14 February
2014) ‘Graduate glut: 12,000 new lawyers every year’
(referencing data from
Department of Education, Department of Employment)
Tait, A., (2003) ‘Reflections on student support in
open and
distance learning’ International Review of Research in Open
and Distance
Learning 4(1), 2003
Westwood, F., (2014) ‘Vocational legal
education – its pivotal role in the future of the legal
profession, The
Calling of Law, Ashgate, Westwood, F.,
and
Barton, K., (ed)