June 16, 2017

What skills make for good lawyers?

Clients and lawyers, when asked, gave a range of answers: Negotiation. Risk management. Empathy. Active listening. Efficiency. Management. Conjecture. Strategy. Business management skills.

There are many skills which are hard to pin down, hard to measure, but very, very important to being an effective lawyer. In this session, we will work in small groups to try to pin down what these skills are and how to classify them. Time permitting, we might try to develop what sorts of activities might help students develop these skills. If time is very generous, we might even try to come up with some ways in which we might measure whether or not we are successful, or what technologies might help facilitate that sort of development.

This session will be facilitated by Piotr Mitros, the Chief Scientist of edX, and the creator of the edX platform. Mitros is experienced in using technology to support evidence-based techniques in teaching-and-learning across a range of fields, and is a leader in the fledgling field of using big data to assess complex skills. Mitros believes in bringing together subject matter experts (in this case, lawyers), educators, and technologists to improve teaching-and-learning experiences.