Professional Skills and Values in Legal Education - Institute for Law ...

2009] Teaching Professional Skills in Law School 547
evaluate the role that skills and values courses played in their transition
to practice. Former students could rank the degree to which the skills
and values taught in law school have helped in their present area of
practice. Another way of assessing the effectiveness of skills and values
courses is to surveyor interview employers of the graduates. Both the
Garth and Martin survey of Chicago and Missouri lawyers, and the
Sonsteng and Camarotto survey of Minnesota lawyers, provide excellent
examples of sophisticated efforts to determine how recent graduates
learned the professional skills essential to success as a lawyer. l2O
Assessment of the effectiveness of curricular changes will be the next
challenge for law schools who have responded to the calls for more
attention to professional skills and values in legal education. It will be
fruitful ground for new scholarship and a basis for continuous
improvement. Serious assessment is the way to demonstrate that the
increased attention to the underfed side of legal education is critical to
preparing students for practice in the twenty-first century.
120 Garth & Martin, supra note 9, at 478-99; Sonsteng & Camarotto, supra note 9, at 336-41,
248-69.