Standardized Client Initiative

Welcome

A warm welcome to the Simulated Client Initiative (SCI), an international collaboration to develop a research base and resources for the use of simulated clients in legal education. This public blog has been assembled as a resource for all academics, practitioners, students and interested in the use of SCs at any stage of legal education.   

SCs @ Osgoode Hall Law School

We're in the process of setting up an experimental pilot SC project at Osgoode, currently training 12 SCs who will be helping students to learn interviewing skills on Legal Process, a 1L course in the Osgoode JD.  We kick off tomorrow with a presentation to students on the course (around 290), followed by a tutorial on interviewing skills, and then two interviews with SCs - the first mandatory, the second voluntary - where the SCs will give feedback to students on their performance.  We're using the SC assessment schedule and the assessment criteria that are available under a Creative Commons licence and which can be downloaded from the resources list on this blog.  SC training going well.  It's possibly the first such project in Canada.  Exciting!  Will be posting our progress here...

Simulated Client workshop, ANU, Canberra, 16.8.17

Our second international Simulated Client workshop, which this time was held under the auspices of the PEARL centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, went very well - 31 registrants, seven speakers, and as with the first event in London, lots of lively discussions, questions, and take-aways for those present. All workshop resources will be posted in the LH column of this blog, under SCI Workshop, Canberra, 16.8.17.  Here are the permalinks to the liveblogged posts on my blog over at paulmaharg.com:

Debra Nestel, Simulations for learning and teaching: Experiences from healthcare

Lucy Evans, The experience of using SCs at Flinders Law School 

Julienne Jen, Research into SCs: The Hong Kong University experience 

Moira Murray, SCs and students at ANU College of Law: Student evaluation of the use of SCs 

Anneka Ferguson, Vivien Holmes, Pamela Taylor-Barnett, The power of narrative: Immersive video/audio work with students

SCI workshop plenary wrap-up.

I’m hoping to organise a third and final event next year at Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto.  More to follow on that.  Anyone want more information on any of the three events, please do drop me a line.

Our second international Simulated Client workshop, which this time was held under the auspices of the PEARL centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, went very well - 31 registrants, seven speakers, and as with the first event in London, lots of lively discussions, questions, and take-aways for those present. All workshop resources will be posted in the LH column of this blog, under SCI Workshop, Canberra, 16.8.17.  Here are the permalinks to the liveblogged posts on my blog over at paulmaharg.com:

Debra Nestel, Simulations for learning and teaching: Experiences from healthcare

Lucy Evans, The experience of using SCs at Flinders Law School 

Julienne Jen, Research into SCs: The Hong Kong University experience 

Moira Murray, SCs and students at ANU College of Law: Student evaluation of the use of SCs 

Anneka Ferguson, Vivien Holmes, Pamela Taylor-Barnett, The power of narrative: Immersive video/audio work with students

SCI workshop plenary wrap-up.

I’m hoping to organise a third and final event next year at Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto.  More to follow on that.  Anyone want more information on any of the three events, please do drop me a line.

Simulated Client workshop, Canberra 16.8.17

Tomorrow we're holding the second of our three international all-day workshops on SCs. It'll be held in University House, The Australian National University, Canberra, and is sponsored by the PEARL centre in the ANU College of Law (Profession, Education and Regulation in Law). We've got interesting speakers talking about the use of SCs in Australian law schools, and Debra Nestel, Professor of Simulation Education in Healthcare at Monash, will be giving the plenary. Really looking forward to it.

Simulated Client workshop, London, 2.6.17

Our Simulated Client workshop held at City Law School, London, went well - 27 registrants, eight speakers, lots of lively discussions, questions, and let's hope more SC projects as a result. There are four posts on my blog over at paulmaharg.com - permalinks below:

http://paulmaharg.com/2017/06/02/sci-session-1-roger-kneebone/
http://paulmaharg.com/2017/06/03/session-7-scs-and-professional-development-for-lawyers/
http://paulmaharg.com/2017/06/06/simulated-client-final-session-ahead-of-whose-curve/

I’m hoping to organise a sister event at the PEARL (Profession, Education and Regulation in Law) Centre, ANU College of Law in Canberra, last week of July, and another perhaps later this year or early next at Osgoode in Toronto. More to follow on that.  Anyone want more information, please do drop me a line.

Simulated Clients: A workshop on interdisciplinary learning and teaching in legal education

Along with Nigel Duncan, Scott Slorach and Caroline Strevens I've helped to organise a series of workshops for the Legal Education section of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS).  I’m putting together the next workshop, called ‘Simulated Clients: A workshop on interdisciplinary learning and teaching in legal education’.  It will be held on Friday 2 June, 0950-1600, in the Common Room of the Atkin Building, City Law School, City University, London.   Here's the flyer and an extract from it:

The [use of simulated clients] challenges many aspects of our current theory and practice in legal education, including the following:

1. Curriculum structures: the method leads us to re-design our conventional curriculum interventions.
2. Ethics of the client encounter
3. The cognitive poverty of much of conventional law school assessment
4. Law school as a self-regarding, monolithic construct
5. Law school categories of employment
6. The curricular isolation of clinic within law schools
7. Hollowed-out skills rhetoric
8. Conventional forms of regulation by regulatory bodies
9. The role of regulator, less as monitor/accreditor and more as encourager of innovation & reform.
10. Disciplinary boundaries – SCs and educators can learn much from other interdisciplinary practices
11. SCs reflect local jurisdictional practices – how might such a project work, globally?

This workshop will give you the opportunity to hear from a distinguished medical educator who has worked in the field of simulation as well as examples of practice from a range of jurisdictions.  You will hear in detail the work of the Simulated Client Initiative (SCI), its global setting, and examples of SCs in use in a range of programmes.  You will learn how to set up a SC project in your institution, how SCs interact with students, novice lawyers and can be used for lawyers’ continuous professional development, and how they can be used to develop a range of legal skills.  You’ll learn how to sustain a community of SCs in your law school, how to create a research agenda around the heuristic, and much else.

We can accommodate around 30-35 participants.  You can register here, and workshop resources will be put up on this SCI webpage in the next month.  If there are many more registrants than 35, we’ll hold it again later in the year.  I’ll be live blogging it on the day; and I’m also organising a sister event in ANU later in the year, possibly one later again, in Toronto.

Hope to see you in London!

SCI redivivus

It's been quite a while since I added to this site but it's due for a revival, for the use of SCs has been increasing in the last few years.  Since the last post way back in 2011 the use of SCs has developed in at least four interesting ways:

Professional skills assessment
In 2013 the SRA redesigned their creaking QLTT, Qualifying Lawyers Transfer Test, effectively a paper and pencil test of knowledge, to include assessments of knowledge, skills and values.  The new and much more rigorous assessment, called the Qualifying Lawyers Transfer Scheme (QLTS), is detailed below, and in much more detail in articles by Crewe, Fry and Wakeford published in The Law Teacher.  It was based in part on the work of the SCI, and Maharg was asked to join the Working Party that created the assessment and the tender documentation.  It's discussed briefly in posts below.  It represents a significant step-change in the assessment of professional legal skills, and has attracted the attention of regulators globally.

Extension of jurisdictional base
Originally set up in Scotland, with invaluable assistance from the USA and England, the SCI now reaches as far afield as Australia, Hong Kong and the USA, and will be extending further in the next few years.

Growth of research literature
Over the past six years Wilson Chow and Michael Ng, Hong Kong Faculty of Law, have contributed serious studies of interdisciplinary and inter-cultural aspects of SC use in legal education.  Some of their work is represented in the LH column.  Over in the USA, a fine study of the University of New Hampshire's Daniel Webster Honors Scholar programme, Ahead of the Curve, demonstrates the power and effectiveness of the heuristic.  Rory O'Boyle has written in detail about use of the SCs in Irish professional legal education; and is currently undertaking a doctoral study on the heuristic.  This and other research represents a growing body of educational research on an almost entirely new heuristic in legal education.

Expansion of international collaboration
In Hong Kong, two universities are using the method in their programmes of study.  If the third can be brought into the SCI then Hong Kong will be the first jurisdiction to have all HE institutions using the method.  We're working with some regulators to persuade them of the power and flexibility of the method, not just for professional education but as a tool of general legal education that should be an essential element of undergraduate programmes.  And as the LETR Report pointed out, we need a shared approach internationally where regulators and providers can meet, discuss and analyse projects such as the SCI, and reflect on how it could be used, or better used, within their jurisdictions.

So the site has been dusted off, updated, and blog posts and resources will be added on an occasional basis.  Want to be a member of the SCI?  We're looking for members to be actively involved, either in setting up SC projects, in maintaining them, and/or researching them.  You don't have to be a legal educator, just someone interested in doing work in the field, whatever your discipline.  If you're interested or want more information, contact Paul Maharg, email [email protected] .  

Teaching Legal Ethics workshop

I was presenting yesterday on Standardized Clients at the Teaching Legal Ethics workshop organized and hosted by Clark Cunningham and Nigel Duncan, at City University.  Very interesting workshop, well designed and implemented.  The title of my session was 'The Standardized Client Initiative: a portrait of the teacher as outsider'.  Slides at Slideshare, or on the Slides page here.  

Update on SCs and QLTS

You may remember that SCs are being used by the SRA in their newly designed Qualifying Lawyers’ Transfer Scheme (QLTS).  They’re being used in the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), currently (and I mean currently…) being run by Kaplan, which won the contract to hold the assessment.  Jenny Rawstorne, SRA, and Dr Eileen Fry, Kaplan, presented on the subject at the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) Conference, Open B Subject section, in a presentation entitled ‘QLTS – what have the doctors ever done for us?’  Brief summary & thoughts below the fold.

Standardized Clients in Ireland

I was over in Dublin recently training a new group of Standardized Clients at the Law Society of Ireland. Six in total, and they were a wonderful, vibrant group of SCs -- we had a great time during the pretty intensive training sessions.  Rory O'Boyle, Maeve Regan and Freda Griely from the Law Society were present throughout, and will continue to work with the SCs in refresher training & with new SCs.  The SCs will be used with solicitors and later with students on the Law Society's professional progammes.

SCs are now used in at least three jurisdictions: Scotland, USA and Ireland.  England and Wales next --Karen Barton and I will be training SCs next week at the University of Northumbria Law School -- we'll let you know how that goes -- possibly live blog it if we have the time...

Future Ed conference & SCs...

John Garvey, Karen Barton and Paul are at the third Future Ed conference in New York Law School, presenting on the Daniel Webster programme, which includes SCs and SIMPLE.  Slides here, paper here.   Really an update on the project, showing what we're doing in each side of the project, and how we're bring the two forms of simulation pedagogy together, and the data on cost, feasibility and impact.  Lots of interest shown in the idea.  More posts later...