One of the initiatives I’ve been working on in the last 20 years is the Simulated Client Initiative. I’ve worked with a range of partners to establish SC projects internationally. I’ve also organised international workshops in London (Gray’s Inn), Canberra (ANU College of Law) and Toronto, which were liveblogged in this blog
This month, people attending back-to-back international conferences in Amsterdam on legal ethics and clinical education have the opportunity to attend an afternoon workshop on SCs, entitled ‘Improving Client Relationship Skills’, held on Saturday 20 July – draft agenda below. Clark Cunningham and I are hosting and, as part of the workshop, there will be a live demonstration of the use of SCs in helping students to learn client-facing skills, and helping academics to assess lawyer-client communication skills. There will also be discussion of the research literature, and the use of sims across a range of disciplines and professions.
This sim methodology has of course long been standard in the medical field. Like their colleagues in medical education, sim clients are rigorously trained to play a client role with accuracy and consistency and to evaluate the interviewer’s performance. Some faculty have conducted research on the method, most notably in Hong Kong. Recently, conducting SC assessment over the internet has been validated, making cost-effective expansion of the methodology feasible around the world.
SC methodology is now part of lawyer licensing processes in England, in four provinces in Canada, and the state of New Hampshire in the USA, and has been used in legal education in Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Ireland, the USA, the UK and Canada. Below are the range of partners I worked with on SC projects internationally:
| 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, Australia) |
| Northumbria University Law School (Newcastle, England) | Kwansei Gakuin University Law School (Osaka, Japan) |
| Solicitors Regulation Authority Qualifying Lawyers Transfer Scheme (QLTS) & Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) (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 (Hong Kong) | Flinders Law School (Adelaide, South Australia) |
| Nottingham Trent University Law School (Nottingham, England) | Osgoode Hall Law School & Osgoode Professional Development (Toronto, ON, Canada) |
| Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education (CPLED, Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP) (Provinces of AB, MB, SK, NS) | Newcastle Law School (Newcastle, England) |
| University of Windsor Faculty of Law (Windsor, ON, Canada) |
The workshop will be held in The Hub at Amsterdam Law School and will begin with a lunch. It will be preceded by a one-hour optional canal tour ending at The Hub; an optional social hour will follow. There is no fee for the workshop or the optional activities. The only application is completion of the on-line form, available here.
The workshop is co-sponsored by the Amsterdam Law School, Osgoode Professional Development and the National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism-USA (NIFTEP). For more information contact NIFTEP’s Director Professor Clark Cunningham at Georgia State University College of Law: cdcunningham@gsu. Come and join us!
Slides
Textual resources
For those of you attending, or if you’re interested in reading more about the initiative, there are many resources on sim clients and sim persons hosted on a public Zotero library assembled by Angela Yenssen and myself. For a more focused list of resources, see below.
- Barton, K., Cunningham, Jones, C.G., Maharg, P. (2006). Valuing what clients think: standardized clients and the assessment of communicative competence. Clinical Law Review, 13,1, 1-65
- Gerkman, A., Harman, E., Bond, L., Sullivan, W. (2015). Ahead of the Curve. Turning Law Students into Lawyers. A Study of the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), University of Denver.
- Maharg, P., Yenssen, A. (2022). Transitioning simulated client interviews from face-to-face to online: Still an entrustable professional activity? European Journal of Law and Technology, 13, 3. Available at: https://ejlt.org/index.php/ejlt/article/view/899.
Program [draft]:
12:15 – 12:30 Arrival at The Hub, check-in, pick up lunch meal
12:30 – 12:40 Welcome
Prof. dr. drs. Iris van Domselaar
Director, Amsterdam Centre on the Legal Professions and Access to Justice.
Tim Verheij
Coördinator, Onderwijs & Rechtshulp – Amsterdam Law Hub.
12:40 – 13:00 Workshop overview
Prof. Clark D. Cunnningham, Georgia State University College of Law, Director, National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism (USA)
13:00 – 13:20 Learning client relationship skills – what Dutch legal
aid clinics do.
13:20 – 13:50 Simulated Clients – theory and practice
Prof. Paul Maharg
13:50 – 14:50 Demonstration and discussion of online simulated client meeting
14:50 – 15:10 Break-out group discussion of possible applications of simulated client methodology in different settings
15:10 – 15:30 Reports from break-out groups and possible next steps.