Much to my dismay, when I speak to practicing attorneys, I repeatedly hear that law school didn’t prepare them to be lawyers. The main culprit? They often point to the individualistic nature of law school, saying the practice of law is collaborative, but rather than encouraging collaboration, law school encourages isolation.
Students read for class on their own, answer cold calls on their own, and study and take their final exams on their own. On top of that, we’re graded on a curve, which pits us against each other with the idea that if another student does well, that’s bad for us.
I refuse to give in to the idea that law school is a zero-sum game. Life isn’t that way, and law school shouldn’t be either. Rather than being threatened by my classmates’ successes, I celebrate them. And there’s good reason for you to do the same. It will enhance your learning and prepare you to be a successful practicing attorney.
In her book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, late Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier points out that much of the way law school functions is in opposition to how lawyers practice in the real world. Her experience as a voter rights lawyer involved working among groups of lawyers who had all read the same cases but had different interpretations. She said that working through these differing interpretations made her and her colleagues more effective lawyers.
Guinier believed law school should also focus on collaboration, so much so that she allowed her students to work in groups on their finals. Guinier found that when students worked together, they had increased confidence in and an understanding of the material because collaboration forced students to explain their thinking in a way that made sense to their peers. It also allowed for feedback that often expanded their thinking.
Pedagogical approaches that focus on collaborative learning have proven to be highly successful. For example, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, then-graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley Uri Treisman realized that Black students were doing worse than their Asian counterparts in his calculus class.
When he investigated, he found that the Black students studied just as much, if not more, than their Asian counterparts. However, the Black students studied in isolation, keeping their social and academic lives separate. The Asian students, however, formed academic communities in which their social and academic lives merged.
Treisman developed what’s now known as the Treisman Method, where he sought to build community among all students to study mathematics by creating workshops. These weren’t tutoring groups. Instead, they were focused on solving difficult, deep, and thought-provoking problems. His goal was to encourage students to engage in solving the problems together and to build on the students’ existing strengths.
After implementing these workshops, Treisman found that the Black students began to perform as well as their Asian counterparts in the class.
As the research shows, there are excellent reasons for professors to create problems for students to work on in groups (shout out to those professors who are already doing this!). But if your law school experience is anything like mine, most of your professors aren’t doing this.
That’s OK! You can do it on your own. Grab a group of classmates and commit to working through your class material together.
But let’s get practical. The groups you create will take intentionality and commitment. When you first start your group, set expectations. Share what you know about the Treisman Method and the benefits of working through material and problems together. Talk about how your group wants to operate. How often do you want to meet? What are your expectations for each meeting? Who’ll be responsible for what, such as supplying problem sets for each meeting?
Importantly, Treisman’s learning communities relied on problem sets to drive group interaction. When creating our own learning communities, we need to have challenging and thought-provoking problems to discuss.
We can find these in a few different places. First and most relevantly, you can develop them from your class materials. Take the cases, hypotheticals, and problems assigned by your professor and work through them as a group.
Get creative with it. Can you think of examples from your own lives that could be relevant to the class material? For example, during my torts class, when we were going over negligence, I was on a run and tripped over a walnut in a local park. I wondered if I had a tort claim against the city—and that question would have been a perfect problem for a study group to work through.
If you need more problem sets, turn to the resources in your law school’s library. My law school offers a wide array of supplements, including Emanuel CrunchTime, Examples and Explanations, and Glannon Guides for various law school subjects. Ask your librarians how you can access these for free through the library.
Each study guide contains various questions, problems, and hypotheticals to work through with your group. You and your groupmates could select problems from these books that align with what you’ve learned in class. When a problem really stumps your group, take it to your professor and ask questions that have arisen during your discussions.
For the best success, when working within your group, you must be willing to alternate between giving and receiving instruction. Giving instruction, admittedly, might be difficult for you. But it’s just as important that we learn how to articulate our ideas as it is to learn from others.
The legal field demands that we develop creative problem-solving skills and higher-level conceptual learning that allows us to attack problems from various angles. These skills are best learned in collaboration. So, do yourself a favor and start your own study group.
