A few years ago, I was asked to review a law firm’s student recruitment program. The firm had a respected brand, an engaged student committee, and a long history of bringing in summer and articling students.

The assignment seemed straightforward: review the process and suggest ways to strengthen the program.

So, I began by following the time.

There were student committee meetings. Planning sessions with marketing and talent professionals. Law school outreach events and receptions. Resume reviews. Interview preparation. Full days of interviews involving partners, associates, and administrators. Post-interview debriefs. Offer discussions. Candidate follow ups.

By the time the exercise . . . [more]

During the ten years I spent closely involved in teaching articled clerks lawyering skills, I often described the program—only half jokingly—as “How to Deal with Humans.”

This past October, I read an article by Jordan Furlong titled “Three core attributes of tomorrow’s lawyer,” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. One of the attributes Furlong identifies is personal trustworthiness. He uses this category to capture what he calls “relational skills”: empathy, listening, collaboration, judgment, and discretion. In short, he is talking about relationship-building.

But why are we still talking about this?

Shouldn’t law students arrive in practice with . . . [more]

For most of my career, I have worked on the inside of law firms — advising partners, managing change, fixing things that quietly but persistently get in the way of good work. Strategy. Marketing. Associate retention. Recruitment. Training. Culture. All the unglamorous but consequential pieces that impacts whether a firm thrives or stalls.

Along the way, I noticed something that never really changed.

Every year, bright, capable law students arrive at firms deeply motivated to do well — and surprisingly underprepared for what the job actually requires. Not because they lack intelligence or work ethic, but because no one ever . . . [more]

Experiential learning—learning by doing—is central to competency‑based education because it bridges theory and practice. The question for instructors is not whether experiential learning matters, but how best to support learners on that journey. Should instructors be teaching, facilitating, or something else entirely?

Teaching vs. Facilitating: What’s the Difference?

To answer that question, it helps to clarify the distinction between teaching and facilitating.

Teaching focuses on the delivery of knowledge from an expert to a learner. It is most often associated with lectures or demonstrations, where the instructor’s role is to explain concepts, model skills, and ensure learners understand foundational theory. . . . [more]

When starting a PhD thesis or other long piece of writing (any substantial intellectual project really), choosing the right topic is a significant part of whether the end result will be successful. Graduate students choose their topics in many ways. Some see postings for PhD positions within research groups and apply to work on a project with a particular researcher. Some may start a degree program and decide on a topic after they’ve spent time with the subject. And some have a passion for a particular topic and want to spend several years working deeply on it to move the . . . [more]

Law schools everywhere are confronting the same issue: how to use AI to help rather than hinder student learning.

In an earlier column, I speculated on ways we might help law students foster good over bad uses of AI. A paper published this summer by Dutch law professor Thibault Schrepel surveys the growing literature on experiments with AI in legal education. His overview provides a more concrete sense of what better uses of AI might entail.

These applications all have potential pitfalls, but these too can be harnessed as part of the learning process. To begin with the most . . . [more]

In early 2025, I participated in the Society for Experiential Education’s Experiential Education Academy. One of the sessions I attended focused on reflection, one of the eight principles of good practice in experiential learning. While we discussed the benefits of reflection, what struck me most was a comment made during the session: students needing to be taught how to reflect.

That’s right, reflection is not an innate ability. It is a skill we must learn.

That knowledge clarified many of my past experiences in legal education. Student don’t often like to reflect. Of course, they don’t, they don’t understand its . . . [more]

Lawyers develop and grow through the experiences they gain in practice. That’s why lawyers who have been practicing longer charge a higher hourly rate. More senior lawyers have more experiences to draw when helping clients solve problems. And it’s that experience that junior lawyers wish they could somehow bottle and consume to bypass the uncertainty and doubt that plagues them in their initial years of practice.

But what if we could jump start aspiring lawyers by helping them build a toolbox of experiences to draw on in their early years of practice? That’s where experiential learning comes in.

Learning by

To understand the benefits of competency-based learning, we must first understand what it is. Competency-based learning is like learning to ride a bike. The journey starts with a tricycle, where the rider first learns to pedal. Eventually, they graduate to a bicycle with training wheels. As confidence builds, the training wheels are raised and eventually removed. The novice rider wobbles and falls, scraping a knee. But they learn from each fall, getting back on the bike with increasing confidence and steadiness. Eventually, they can ride smoothly and consistently. Later, the rider may decide to try mountain biking, applying their prior . . . [more]

The concept of “professional identify formation” came to the fore in 2007, when the report Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law[1] was published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching . Commonly known as the Carnegie Report, it determined that preparation for the profession required three apprenticeships. The third of these was “concerned with providing entrants to the field effective ways to engage and make their own the ethical standards, social roles, and responsibilities of the profession, grounded in the profession’s fundamental purposes.”[2] This concept became known as “professional identify formation.”

Further defining professional

Civility and its importance are contested in the Canadian legal profession and the Canadian legal academy. [1] Moreover, civility and the broader concept of professionalism have a shameful history as exclusionary concepts with significant negative impact on the ability of members of equity-seeking groups to join the legal profession and succeed in the practice of law. [2] The contemporary complexities of civility and professionalism remain problematic.[3] And even at its pinnacle, the civility movement had its critics as well as its supporters.[4] In the aftermath of Law Society of Upper Canada v Groia, the movement may not . . . [more]

An email from a faculty member at the University of Toronto on the topic of AI made the rounds at law schools across Canada recently. It’s about using AI on final exams.

It points out that if a student has an app already open when they launch Examplify – the software most schools use to administer exams – they will have access to that app while writing the exam. This could be a browser with Lexis+AI or the app version of ChatGPT, which would still be online during the exam.

To avoid this, the company that makes Examplify advises running . . . [more]