With the leadership of Joy Radice, Brian Krumm and former Dean and Clinic Director Doug Blaze, the College has revamped the 1L curriculum to include four new experiential elements.
First, each student enrolls in an experiential section of either Civil Procedure I or Torts, in which they participate in three simulation-based assignments. Second, each student takes a new Lawyering and Professionalism course taught by Doug Blaze, which focuses on essential lawyering skills, values of the legal profession, and resources for early career planning.
Third, legal writing and criminal law professors now work together to formulate linked writing assignments. Finally, all students participate in a one-credit transactional lab, the text for which is Brian Krumm’s new co-authored textbook, A Transactional Matter: A Guide to Business Lawyering. Professor Krum and his co-authors developed this publication to fill a vital gap in the literature. It is the first published resource for teaching entrepreneurial law to clinic students. A Transactional Matter chronicles the development of a start-up that UT’s Business Clinic represented from initial entity formation through post-asset sale.
As our former Clinic Director Doug Blaze notes, “[o]ur revamped curriculum and our new course, Lawyering and Professionalism, builds wonderfully on our historical focus on clinical opportunities. Students are not only exposed to the wide range of what lawyers do, they get hands-on experience on what it means to be a lawyer through simulated skills exercises. In the process, we hope they stay excited about the law and remember why they came to law school in the first place.”