About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

15 Transactions: Tenn. J. Bus. L. 137 (2013-2014)
The First Year: Integrating Transactional Skills

handle is hein.journals/transac15 and id is 143 raw text is: THE FIRST YEAR: INTEGRATING TRANSACTIONAL SKILLS LYNNISE E. PANTIN* My name is Lynnise Pantin. I teach at New York Law School, and my talk today focuses on integrating transactional skills into the first-year curriculum. As a first premise, the law school curriculum is dominated by litigation- oriented skills, and I can argue that there is a litigation bias that is pervasive in legal education. I am hoping that, by engaging with those of you who teach first- year students, we can start to talk about creating and developing transactional skills within a context that is already there in the first-year curriculum. Students want to learn transactional skills. After I give my students my typical talk on the first day, I give them my bio. I tell them that I practiced corporate law. Many of them come up to me after class and want to talk to me. They want to meet me. They want to get to know me. They really want to practice corporate law. And they want to know how they can do it. I also have students who have sent friends to me. They say, You know, you should meet this professor. She was a practicing lawyer. She did corporate work. My friend wants to do it. Can you talk to him or her? Anecdotally, I think that there is a real need to teach corporate and transactional skills and that students really want to practice corporate law and they really want to learn transactional skills. The bottom line is that many students want to be transactional lawyers, so I think starting from that premise of wanting to serve students or fulfill a need in law school is one of the arguments that you can make about why we should integrate and continue to work towards developing transactional learning in our first-year courses. Additionally, how can students decide between litigation and transactional practice if they are not exposed to both? Some skills often transcend subject matter, so one of my focuses today is going to be about client interviewing and counseling. Typically, client interviewing and counseling often is framed in the litigation context; by thinking about it in a transactional framework, you can transcend that subject matter and bring transactional learning into the teaching of client interviewing and counseling. We all know that law schools are giving more and more attention to developing practice-ready attorneys. This means that we must develop law * Lynnise E. Pantin is an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School. This article is based on a presentation Professor Pantin gave at Emory University School of Law's Third Biennial Conference on Teaching Transactional Law and Skills in November 2012. 137

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most