Designing a Transactional Law Clinic for Life-Long Learning

Abstract

This article makes an important contribution to existing clinical scholarship generally, and, more specifically, to scholarship about transactional lawyering and transactional law clinics. It is one of the first articles to detail transactional clinic design and is particularly important as the number of transactional clinics continues to increase and more articles about transactional clinical scholarship are published. This article serves as a blueprint for the start or redesign of a transactional clinic. Drawing from the author’s start-up expertise, this article identifies the concepts that are unique to and essential for effective transactional clinic design. In addition to proposing best practices for transactional clinic design, this article focuses on the unique utility of transactional law clinics to teach professional development and identity to law school students — an articulated apprenticeship in the oft-cited 2007 Carnegie Foundation Report. The article demonstrates these points through an analysis of teaching law school students the reflective skill of self-regulated learning, which emphasizes for students the way they learn as opposed to what they learn.