[Guest post by Neil Hamilton and Verna Monson. I visited St Thomas during the NIFTEP conference in Steele County and was deeply impressed by the depth of their commitment to legal ethics. (The same is true about NIFTEP. If you teach PR and can go to NIFTEP, you should go.]
How do peer-honored exemplary lawyers understand and define professionalism? A clearer definition of professionalism is important because the draft accreditation standards changes working their way through the ABA Section of Legal Education’s Standards Review Committee (as of the April, 2011 draft) require law schools to place much greater emphasis on preparing students to practice law ethically. The draft accreditation change stresses helping students both understand and exercise professional judgment consistent with the “values of the legal profession” including “professionalism.” The draft also requires law schools to define clearly ethics learning outcomes for students, and to assess student progress toward those outcomes.
We thought that professionalism award winners would be one key group to interview to ask their understanding of what professionalism means. Our interview study is part of a series of studies (using both legal analysis and qualitative and quantitative empirical research) seeking to define clearly the elements of professionalism and its synonyms, ethical professional identity and ethical professional formation. If we observe significant similarities in the elements of professionalism or professional formation across a number of research windows, we move toward a research-validated definition useful in articulating learning outcomes that can be assessed.
To identify lawyers formally recognized by peers in Minneapolis and the surrounding metropolitan area for exemplary professionalism, we reviewed county and state bar association websites to identify professionalism award winners from the past 10 years who are presently practicing law in a law firm, law department including corporate and government departments, or non-profit entity. From a master list of 45 professionalism award winners, we randomly selected twelve lawyers from a diverse range of organizations, including large and medium firms, legal aid organizations, and non-profits. All of the selected attorneys agreed to participate in a 45-minute interview, and to review the interview transcript to ensure accuracy.
We found that all of these peer-honored lawyers’ definitions of professionalism emphasized internalization of a moral core related to legal practice. They thought the moral core focused on deep responsibilities to others including clients, colleagues, the profession, and the broader society. Rather than describe professionalism exclusively as a knowledge base, technical skill, or effectiveness in influencing or persuading others, these exemplars also talked in depth about their inner life – of reflection, learning from mistakes, and constantly challenging themselves to continue learning and growing. In short, these exemplars talked about a way of being, of acquiring habits of reflection and soul searching, of questioning their personal assumptions about how to be an effective lawyer, or how to lead other lawyers. Additionally, we also found that this dynamic definition of professionalism – or what we call transformational professionalism – seemed directly related to leadership of these lawyers within the profession.
How did exemplars compare with younger attorneys or law students in our previous studies of early career attorneys, and law students entering law school? We saw a marked shift in the complexity, or maturity, from law students and early career lawyers (novices) compared to exemplars (experts). The expert-novice approach is a framework used extensively in adult education and development, and health professions education, that acknowledges the importance of learning based on experience, and is used to define what is meant by competence in a particular domain, such as professionalism.
Constructive developmental psychology offers an important window to understand what development look like. Individuals over time can move from an early-stage egocentric understanding of reality to a less egocentric, more responsible, more penetrating grasp of reality. Developmental growth is easiest to see when we examine underlying reasons for decisions or for opinions to complex problems. While in earlier stages, a person sees moral issues as black and white, with developmental growth, a person sees more shades of gray. Where a person once blindly followed a path pre-prescribed by important others – in his or her career or personal life – the person now strives to forge his or her own identity and core values. Gradually, a person can step back from situations with a newfound sense of personal autonomy and is able to discern the boundary of self and powerful others, or institutions. This growth occurs in stages, can occur across a lifetime, and can be both fostered in higher education or law firm culture and assessed.
What does this mean for law firms and legal education? For one, it means that individual levels of maturity or identity development is a variable that can be measured, and that this variability exerts a powerful influence over what values are seen as important, how effective our relationships with clients or associates are, and how capable we are at maintaining our identity and boundaries within powerful social settings. Secondly, it means that the differences in professionalism relate to developmental processes. In order to coach or mentor law students and associates towards a more complex idea of professionalism, the educator or mentor would first benefit from understanding where that associate or student is at, and then helping them by appropriate challenges that inspire supported growth or change from the student’s current stage of development in terms of moral capacities.
Last, many legal educators are skeptical about the very notion that adults can grow in terms of their moral capacities. In a recent article in Professional Lawyer, we respond to the skeptics by citing decades of research that adults can continue to grow in moral capacities throughout life. This current study of exemplary lawyers and their understanding of professionalism adds to the evidence through the finding of expert-novice differences. Our findings represent key evidence that a person’s view of a professional domain can change with increasing competence in practice, following a predictable sequence according to lifespan developmental theory.
To read the full paper, download a working draft of our paper, Ethical Professional (Trans)formation: Themes from Interviews About Professionalism with Exemplary Lawyers, at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1804419. This paper is accepted for publication in the Santa Clara Law Review.