Teaching Suggestions

for Lawyers in Practice: Ethical Decision Making in Context

Edited by Leslie C. Levin and Lynn Mather

Teaching Suggestions for Lawyers in Practice
as a Supplementary Text in Courses in
Professional Responsibility or Legal Profession

Leslie C. Levin and Lynn Mather

Lawyers in Practice is the first book to look closely at the empirical research on lawyers’ work and their actual ethical decision making in a wide variety of practice contexts. Rather than address legal ethics primarily through rules and substantive legal doctrine, this book combines empirical research on legal practice with discussion of some of the ethical issues that arise in the particular area of practice. A central feature of the volume is its interdisciplinary nature, in which lawyers’ decision making is firmly embedded in both the professional world of ethical codes and the sociological and economic setting of the workplace.

We have written this short teaching guide to provide suggestions to instructors on combining this book with other teaching materials, particularly for the two most likely courses—Professional Responsibility and Legal Profession. We provide possible course outlines for each of these courses and then illustrate a few class sessions with discussion questions and possible class exercises. We welcome your feedback and, if this guide proves useful, we will expand the guide to cover a wider range of topics. We first cover Professional Responsibility courses and then present a similar guide for using Lawyers in Practice in Legal Profession courses. For each, we offer a sample 13-week course outline corresponding to individual chapters in the book. This is followed up by a closer look at two of those weeks for which we offer possible study questions, discussion topics, and activities.

At the end of the guide we list the Model Rules of Professional Conduct that each of the chapters directly addresses or indirectly implicates.

The guide “Teaching Suggestions for Lawyers in Practice as a Supplementary Text” is in PDF form.

You may request a 90-day print or e-book exam copy.