Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient

The employment gap for law school graduates is well-documented. Almost 40% of 2015 law graduates did not secure full-time jobs requiring a law license and only 70% of 2015 graduates landed a full-time job that either required a law license or gave a preference to candidates with a juris doctor. One in four 2015 graduates did not report having any type of job, even a non-professional job, after law school. The employment gap is exacerbated by another gap: the gap between the skillset lawyers want in new graduates and the skillset lawyers believe new graduates have. Only 23% of practitioners believe new lawyers have sufficient skills to practice. The gap between what new lawyers have and what new lawyers need exacerbates the employment problem, but it is even more insidious than that. When new lawyers enter the workforce unprepared or under-prepared, it undermines the public trust in our legal system. Something has to shift. And for something to shift, we had to understand exactly what new lawyers need as they entered the profession. So we asked. In late 2014, we launched Foundations for Practice (“FFP”), a national, multi-year project designed to: 1. Identify the foundations entry-level lawyers need to launch successful careers in the legal profession; 2. Develop measurable models of legal education that support those foundations; and 3. Align market needs with hiring practices to incentivize positive improvements in legal education. In 2014-15, we distributed a survey to lawyers across the country. The response was overwhelming. More than 24,000 lawyers in all 50 states from a range of backgrounds and practice settings answered. Their answers are illuminating and pose opportunities and challenges to the schools that educate lawyers and the employers that ultimately hire them

Foundations for Practice: Hiring the Whole Lawyer: Experience Matters

In July 2016, we published Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient, which shared findings from a survey that asked more than 24,000 lawyers what new lawyers need as they enter the profession. Respondents overwhelmingly indicated that new lawyers need characteristics, alongside professional competencies and legal skills (collectively, “foundations”). New lawyers, it turns out, are successful when they can demonstrate much more than their intelligence and legal competency. We called the new lawyer who can demonstrate this combination of characteristics, competencies, and skills the “whole lawyer.” If we want new lawyers to develop the requisite foundations, we of course need law schools to commit to admitting, educating, and graduating students who can demonstrate they have those foundations. We also need employers to commit to hiring new lawyers based on their demonstration of those foundations—rather than mainly academic achievement. How can employers hire new lawyers who have the desired foundations? This report provides answers. In our survey, we asked respondents to identify the foundations new lawyers need to be successful in the respondent’s specific type of organization, specialty, or department. Then we asked them to consider the helpfulness of a set of hiring criteria in determining whether a candidate for employment has the foundations they identified as important. Notably, we did not ask them how they currently hire. We effectively asked how they would hire if they wanted to identify candidates with the necessary foundations. We learned that experience matters. While many employers in practice still rely on criteria like class rank, law school, and law review, our respondents indicated that if they wanted to hire people with the broad array of foundations they identified as important, they would rely on criteria rooted in experience, including legal employment, recommendations from practitioners or judges, legal externships, participation in a law school clinic, and other experiential education. In The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient, we recommended that law schools and the profession work together to ensure that new lawyers have the foundations they need to practice. Our findings here give them a place to start. While we do not believe there is only one way to ensure new lawyers have the foundations they need to be whole lawyers, we do believe the path toward a system that prepares lawyers who are ready to enter the profession will be elevated and supported by experience-focused learning and hiring

Building a Better Bar: The Twelve Building Blocks of Minimum Competence

The bar exam tries to distinguish minimally competent lawyers from incompetent ones: it exists to protect the public from the harms of incompetent legal representation. That protection is critical to maintaining the integrity of the profession, but the bar exam achieves that goal only if it effectively assesses minimum competence. The unfortunate reality is that, although the bar exam has existed for more than a century, there has never been an agreed-upon, evidence-based definition of minimum competence. Absent such a definition, it is impossible to know whether the bar exam is a valid measure of the minimum competence needed to practice law or an artificial barrier to entry. While there have been a handful of efforts to gain an empirical understanding of the skills and knowledge new lawyers use in their early years of practice, few researchers have explicitly sought to define minimum competence. The few attempts to probe minimum competence have relied on surveys, which lack the ability to delve into the nuances of new lawyers’ work. Surveys do not allow new lawyers to describe their work in detail or to explain how they use their skills and knowledge in that work. We designed this study to address these substantial gaps in our knowledge, build on the existing research, and develop an evidence-based definition of minimum competence. In the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, we conducted 50 focus groups using a protocol we developed to gather data about the knowledge and skills new lawyers need to practice competently. Of those focus groups, 41 were conducted with new lawyers, while the remaining nine were conducted with those who supervise new lawyers. Based on our findings, we propose 10 recommendations for courts, law schools, bar associations, bar examiners, and other stakeholders to consider in their efforts to move towards evidence-based lawyer licensing

Morphological and numerical modeling of a highly dynamic tidal inlet at Shippagan Gully, New Brunswick

Shippagan Gully is a highly engineered, tidal inlet located near Shippagan, New Brunswick, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It is a particularly complex tidal inlet due to the fact that its tidal lagoon transects the Acadian peninsula and is open to the Bay des Chaleurs at its opposite end. As such, two open boundaries with phase lagged tidal cycles drive flow through the inlet, alternating direction with each tide and reaching velocities exceeding 2 m/s. Over the past century, despite various engineered interventions, shipping practices through the inlet have been threatened due to the increasing constriction from sediment which has accumulated on the east side of the navigation channel. In addition to highly asymmetrical sediment deposition patterns, severe downdrift erosion suggests the presence of prominent westward net longshore transport, further complicating the coastal morphology at the inlet. Due to the overwhelming requirement for constant maintenance dredging and the long-term degradation of existing coastal structures, a numerical model study of Shippagan Gully has been undertaken in order to identify principal morphology mechanisms and provide guidance for future coastal works. The numerical models CMS Wave and CMS Flow (USACE) have been applied in a coupled manner to simulate the hydrodynamics, coastal processes and morphology changes at the inlet due to the combined effects of waves and tides. Once calibrated to historical morphologic evolution, the coupled models were used to identify the forces driving the morphological changes shaping Shippagan Gully. The methodology and selected results of this study are presented herein.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Helicobacter Pylori: A Review of Current Treatment Options in Clinical Practice

Background: When prescribing antibiotics, infection eradication rates, local resistance rates, and cost should be among the most essential considerations. Helicobacter pylori is among the most common infections worldwide, and it can lead to burdensome sequela for the patient and the healthcare system, without appropriate treatment. Due to constantly fluctuating resistance rates, regimens must be constantly assessed to ensure effectiveness. Methods: This was a narrative review. The sources for this review are as follows: searching on PubMed, Google Scholar, Medline, and ScienceDirect; using keywords: Helicobacter pylori, Treatment Options, Clinical Practice. Results: Multiple antibiotics are prescribed as part of the regimen to thwart high resistance rates. This can lead to unwanted adverse reactions and adherence issues, due to the amount and timing of medication administration, which also may contribute to resistance. Single-capsule combination capsules have reached the market to ease this concern, but brand-only may be problematic for patient affordability. Due to the previously mentioned factors, effectiveness and affordability must be equally considered. Conclusions: This review will utilize guidelines to discuss current treatment options and give cost considerations to elicit the most effective regimen for the patient