Experienced trial lawyers say there are very few things as exciting as the adrenaline rush of delivering a closing statement, interrogating a hostile witness or justifying your objection in court.
They say developing skills in trial advocacy requires guts, grit and plenty of practice, and that prospective law students who dream of representing clients in court should look for a law school where they can hone their advocacy abilities.
Thomas Simeone, a managing partner at a personal injury law firm in Washington, D.C., compares trial advocacy with skiing. He says you can admire an excellent skier or trial lawyer from afar, but that observation of masters can be misleading.
Masters often make difficult tasks seem effortless, he says, which camouflages the extraordinary focus required to perform well.
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Simeone says actually doing trial advocacy and feeling what it’s like is the only way to tell whether you are cut out for it.
Those who think they might want to be trial lawyers should attend a law school that will give them abundant opportunities to test their courtroom aptitude and gauge whether trial law is their calling, experts say.
The following three tips can help prospective students identify law schools that excel in teaching trial advocacy.
1. Look for experienced trial attorneys on the faculty: Experts say law schools that take trial advocacy seriously hire gifted trial lawyers with significant experience to teach those courses. But experts say to avoid schools where only the most recently-hired or youngest professors teach trial advocacy courses and when professors in these programs have limited trial experience.
“If the best and brightest professors are in other departments, then resources aren’t being put there,” Simeone says.
Scott Greenfield, a criminal defense attorney with more than three decades of experience who has taught advocacy in law schools, says junior law school faculty generally get last pick on teaching assignments. So, when only the most junior faculty are in a department, he says, it indicates that teaching in that department is not considered a desirable or prestigious job.
2. Ask if the school incorporates coaching into its trial advocacy program: Colby Connell, a third-year law student at the College of Law at Stetson University, says he has benefited from hearing war stories from his professors who are experienced trial lawyers.
Connell says his trial law professors shared hard-won wisdom about what it takes to succeed as a trial lawyer, including the mistakes they made as young lawyers and the lessons learned from lost cases.
“Every chance you get to talk to these people, you get to pick their brain about real-life situations,” Connell says.
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The 27-year-old Georgia native was on a national champion mock trial team and won a “Best Advocate” prize during that competition.
Connell attributes his success, in part, to the mentoring he received at Stetson, both from experienced trial lawyers who were professors in the school’s trial advocacy program, and an older student assigned as his peer mentor.
“Every student gets a mentor they can talk to when they don’t want to ask a professor,” Connell says. “That’s somebody who can give you perspective and say, ‘You’re going to make it through this. It’s not the end of the world.'”
3. Ensure that career skills are taught and valued: Prospective students should look carefully at schools’ websites to see whether they tout trial advocacy courses as a selling point and try to make graduates practice-ready, says Charles Rose III, director of the trial advocacy program at Stetson.
[Consider specialized program when deciding where to enroll for law school.]
Rose says legal theory ought to be taught in conjunction with legal practice, because doing legal work helps students understand the law and boosts bar passage rates.
Greenfield, the criminal defense attorney, says he perceives a disconnect between trial lawyers and legal academics, who tend to favor more theoretical types of law such as constitutional law over trial law.
“Schools that are heavy into legal philosophy and doctrine tend not to give a student anything whatsoever that can be used to try cases,” Greenfield says.
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Master Trial Advocacy Skills During Law School originally appeared on usnews.com
