We’ve finished our Simulated Client (SC) project at Osgoode Hall Law School, which was around three months in the planning. Further and much more detailed analysis later, but this is a quick post for now to summarise what we did.
Just a few reminders – SCs are people who are trained to do two things well – to represent a client narrative as if it’s being told by a real client, and to assess students’ client-facing skills and attitudes. They do a lot more of course – they help students be aware of client expectations, the role of affect, and the importance of problem-solving, and help develop students’ sense of their own professional identity and voice.
As far as I’m aware, the use of SCs is relatively new to Canadian legal education. Previously, students or actors have been mostly used to play the roles of clients in interviewing, witnesses in mock courts and the like. There can be problems with this approach: verisimilitude, authenticity, robustness, validity of the encounter and fairness in the assessment. SCs, paradoxically, can be more authentic because they are trained to enact being themselves. We train them to react conversationally with the lawyer, not to give the full problem as a linear, logical narrative but to present as if the client were relating to the lawyer for the first time, with narrative gaps, redundancies and other markers of conversational register. Standardisation across the SC cohort is critical.
Others have used similar interdisciplinary approaches to engage students. Gillian Calder for example has done great work using Augusto Boal‘s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques – briefly, playing out a scenario as a drama, and breaking down the fourth wall so that actors can address the audience directly.[1] This is a different approach to that of SCs, though interestingly the same dynamic plays out in both contexts. With Boal and adaptations of his work by Gillian and others, the spectator becomes an actor in the drama, which is precisely what happens to students who are released from a constraining sense of artifice in interviews (‘this is another student across the table’) and become more immersed in the sim client’s lived world.
Here in Osgoode, we trained our SCs in an intense four-day course to be able to memorise two different fact scenarios in two different areas of law; to represent them conversationally; to improvise on a scenario where appropriate; to assess students’ client-facing skills; and to standardise and self-monitor their own performances as SCs. This is complex and difficult work, but in informal feedback from the students afterwards, it was clear that they were impressed with the authenticity of the experience and learned a lot from SCs’ evaluations of their interviewing.
Judgment and evaluation are key factors in training SCs to give feedback and to evaluate summatively the performance of students. In the SCI generally we use the sim clients to assess students’ client-facing behaviours and attitudes because we make client experience the focus of the assessment and ensure the validity and robustness of the assessment. In the foundational experiment back in 2006 at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law in Scotland, we proved in statistical correlations that trained SCs were as good at assessing students as trained tutors. As a result, at Strathclyde since then SCs have been used to assess students’ interviewing skills, with tutors only being used to second-mark borderline and not yet competent grades.
Since 2005 around a dozen SC projects have been established internationally in the SCI, which comprises a loose consortium of law schools, legal educators and legal education regulators where SC projects are established. The institutions where SC training has been undertaken are listed below.
| University of Strathclyde Law School (Glasgow, Scotland) | WS (Writers to the Signet) Society (Edinburgh, Scotland) |
| University of New Hampshire Law School, (Concord, NH, USA) | The Australian National University College of Law (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory) |
| Northumbria University Law School (Newcastle, England) | Kwansei Gakuin University Law School (Osaka, Japan) |
| Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Qualifying Lawyer Transfer Scheme (QLTS), (London, England) | Law Society of Ireland, Continuing Professional Development of Solicitors (Dublin, Ireland) |
| Hong Kong University Faculty of Law (Hong Kong) | National Centre for Skills in Social Care (London, England) |
| The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law (Hong Kong) | Flinders Law School (Adelaide, South Australia) |
| Nottingham Trent University Law School (Nottingham, England) | Osgoode Hall Law School (Toronto, ON, Canada) |
As always, it’s the newness of the method in the local context that creates difficulties – take recruitment, for example. SCs aren’t student tutors, adjuncts, visiting faculty, or tenured faculty – they’re an entirely new category of employment for law schools, and so conventional recruitment procedures and employment terms often have to be reconsidered. Their training is different, too, from that of tutors or facilitators, and their roles are significantly different. True, they are only temporary, part-time; but yet they are trained to undertake one of the most important tasks in law school, namely assessment of students in high-stakes evaluations, and to give feedback to students on performance. Their paradoxical position reveals how they are still outsiders in the law school employment hierarchy. I’d argue that they should be essential insiders when it comes to legal education, much as sim persons are in medical education units; and we need to change employment categories and conditions of service to reflect that.
So how did we use the SCs at Osgoode? They were used in Shelley Kierstead‘s 1L Legal Process course, as part of a module on client interviewing. Shelley and I designed the interviewing module of the course as a pilot, to ensure that we could actually use SCs with the whole 1L class. We prepared students by giving them a brief presentation on the Sim Client Initiative (SCI – more of that below), and a tutorial / workshop on interviewing skills. This was followed by a mandatory meeting with a SC, and a second, voluntary meeting with another SC – for all 290 students on Legal Process. At both interviews the SCs gave students feedback on their interviewing skills – in fact we used SCs with 290 students for formative feedback only, and held most of the interviews in the evenings because of pressure of room bookings and timetabling of classes. As with the employment issues, so too with the curriculum issues: I’d argue we need to re-design the future curriculum matrix much more around these kinds of interventions, and others such as digital simulations, problem-based learning, capstones, negotiated learning projects.
For now, administering a SC project to scale for the entire 1L on the JD at Osgoode meant solving myriad local issues such as filming hundreds of student interviews, and with only 10 SCs. Which we did, with lots of new and critical procedures mapped out for the future, and in spite of two extreme weather emergency declarations at York U that closed down the university and entailed major rescheduling of interviews.[2] We’re now ready to take it to the next level next year… More on this in later posts.
Meanwhile thanks to our former Dean Lorne Sossin and current Dean Mary Condon for their unfailing support; and to Victoria Watkins Exec Director of OPD for permission to use tech staff time, and lots of other support. A huge thanks to the SC team – to Shelley for running the interviewing module and designing it so well on top of everything else in her course; to my invaluable Research Assistant Angela Yenssen for setting up and running procedures brilliantly; to Nicole Salama for recruiting and onboarding SCs and organising timesheets and other admin so capably; to another RA Celine Dookie for managing the reception desk so well evening after evening (see below); to Tiffany Tran for fab tech support on cameras, mikes and laptops. And of course a big shout out to all the SCs for their wonderful work with Osgoode students – Elina, Joan, Brooke, Katie, Evangeline, Daniel, Anne, Angela, Olivia and Margrit. It was such a pleasure to work with you all.
- [1]See eg Calder, G. (2009). Embodied law: Theatre of the Oppressed in the law school classroom. Masks: An Online Journal for Law and Theatre 1, 1-35; and Calder, G. (2010). Guantanamo: Using a play-reading to teach law. Canadian Theatre Review 142, 44-49. The influence of Brecht and Stanislavski are there in Boal’s work, and we can see it in Calder’s adaptations, too.↩
- [2]On those two days there were snowstorms and very low temperatures. AccuWeather reports ‘real-feel’, which factors in not just the effect of windchill but also temperature, humidity, sunshine intensity, cloudiness, precipitation and elevation. A couple of weeks ago one night the real-feel dipped from the mid -30s to -40. When I was alerted on my phone I knew I had to experience it – put on double thermals, mid-layers, light winter boots, no-nonsense beanie & gloves, alpine duvet jacket and went walking into it. I lasted about an hour then had to go inside. The arctic air was frigid and the wind unbelievably cold. I’ve been very cold at altitude in the Alps and on Scottish mountains, but never like this at sea-level. Lovin’ it.↩