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Abstract

As clinicians we are engaged in preparing students to practice law. Part of that task, though certainly not all, is teaching particular lawyering skills, such as interviewing, counseling, negotiating and trial advocacy. Our work rests on a shared conviction that these skills can be performed well or badly, and that it is possible to identify at least some of the elements of superior performance and convey those to our students. Just as firmly we believe that it is possible to provide critiques of our students' efforts to acquire and use these skills. Believing that skills can be identified, explained and critically analyzed, we must also believe that students' mastery of them can be evaluated- whether informally, through the feedback we provide in supervision, or formally, through grades. Indeed, though grading is not universal in in-house clinics, it appears now to be quite common. While we are very much immersed in the task of evaluating lawyering skills, I do not believe that we have studied as carefully as we should the question of whether there are alternative ways to accomplish those responsibilities. If anything, those of us who teach in live-client clinics may have come to take it for granted that the only proper way to evaluate our students' acquisition of skills is through our ongoing, direct observation of the students' actual performances in role, either with real clients or in simulations. This assumption has some justification, for as I assert below this accumulation of one-on-one observations does seem to be the best basis for the evaluation of lawyering skills in the setting of the clinic. But it is not a perfect method, even in the clinics, and outside the clinics-in the many other settings where clinical teaching broadly understood is now underway- one-on-one observation may be completely out of the question.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

2

Issue

2

First Page

349

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