The value of experience in legal competence

Abstract

This article considers the importance of experience in providing competence for legal practitioners in the skill of client interviewing and counselling. Previous research carried out within a laboratory setting 1 developed a system of assessment, which is used in this research to monitor the work of a number of lawyers across a range of experience carrying out real client interviews in their own offices. It is then possible to compare the performance of experienced practitioners against the inexperienced.The "real life" lawyers assessed in this study provide much richer contextual detail than in laboratory settings. The nature of the offices, the work carried out, the details of reception area and age and social background of lawyers and clients can be compared and all of these measured against the competence of the lawyers shown.The value of experience in the practice of legal skills can then be considered and compared with the likely value of directed training methods such as those to be used in the new Law Society Finals, the "Legal Practice Course". Learning By ExperienceThe new system of training for solicitors suggests a change of approach which will involve the teaching of lawyering skills at the postgraduate level. This will be followed up by a Professional Skills Course in articles and a programme of compulsory continuing legal education intended to provide law and skills `top-up' throughout a practitioner's career. 2 For most lawyers, however, formal training in legal skills such as interviewing has not existed and any ability or knowledge has been picked up on the job through the experience of watching others, or carrying out the work itself. Indeed, a strong presumption has existed among many practitioners that experience is the only way of learning such skills. This study is intended to examine the effectiveness of the method of learning by experience alone within the context of lawyer-client interviewing, and to note where training might best be injected into this system. The notion that knowledge and practice can be learned from experience even within a controlled educational environment gained special significance during the 1960s and 1970s as a part of the movement against formalism in education. Legal education in North America, where postgraduate students had been prepared by the regime of undergraduate education, provided fertile ground for the seeds of change. "Clinical legal education" was assisted by strong judicial opinion that legal ethics could only be learned within the culture of practice and experience 3 . This view was supported by the Ford Foundation whose Council for Legal Education in Professional Responsibility funded the first clinical courses in nearly all law schools in the United States 4 . The intention of such courses was partly to provide the practical legal education which was seen as lacking in the non-apprentice based system for legal qualification in North America. It was also seen as a method of transmission of knowledge and ideas which compared favourably with the...

Exploring the information practices of lawyers

“…Two complementary and nurturing aspects of the obligation and professional practice of lawyers in Israel to know the law, as part of information assimilation, are getting to know the client and seeking and gathering legal information. This finding fits the recognition of information seeking and legal research (Leckie et al, 2005;Cohen and Olson, 2016;Jamshed, 2020;Van Opijnen and Santos, 2017;see also: Israel Bar Association, 2018) and intake and ongoing meetings with the clients (Krieger et al, 2020;Sherr, 2000;Ziv, 2016) as essential professional practices of lawyers in Israel that are an inherent part of their legal occupation. An ongoing knowledge management derivative practice is also embedded in the legal workplace setting, coherent with prior studies (Solomon and Bronstein, 2015;Winston, 2014. But see: Evans and Price, 2018 for possible setbacks and challenges in the performance of this practice).…”

“…Interviewing the client is an additional professional task that arises from the legal literature. Past studies suggest that lawyers perform the role of interviewers during initial meetings involving the exchange of information with new clients (Sherr, 2000;Krieger et al, 2020). As such, lawyers use their training, knowledge and insight to ascertain and establish the legal issue in question (Krieger et al, 2020).…”

What Clients Know: Client perspectives and legal competence

“…Unable to judge the competence of the professionals, and needing to believe in their work, lay clients tend to value them highly with satisfaction results showing a ''ceiling effect''. 63 This could suggest that theories which emphasize a non-alignment of lawyer and client are, at least as far as clients are concerned, wide of the mark. Clients do not generally seem to perceive their lawyers as disengaged, uncaring, or otherwise inadequate, although when clients do voice this concern it receives considerable attention.…”