{"id":32,"date":"2018-08-06T18:59:15","date_gmt":"2018-08-06T18:59:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/?p=32"},"modified":"2019-04-10T21:53:30","modified_gmt":"2019-04-10T21:53:30","slug":"boot-camp-equips-students-with-tools-for-inside-careers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/2018\/08\/06\/boot-camp-equips-students-with-tools-for-inside-careers\/","title":{"rendered":"Boot Camp Equips Students With Tools For Inside Careers"},"content":{"rendered":"

When University of Missouri Law School graduate Alyson Carrel first heard about a three-week legal \u201cboot camp\u201d to be held in Chicago in May, and its curriculum offering in-house training, she did not expect a big draw.<\/p>\n

\"alyson-carrel\"

Alyson Carrel<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe weren\u2019t sure our students would be interested,\u201d said Carrel, now the assistant dean of Law and Technology Initiatives at Northwestern University. \u201cBut there was tons of interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The boot camp is an ongoing experiment by the Institute for the Future of Law Practice, a.k.a. IFLP (which its members pronounce as \u201ceye flip\u201d). IFLP is a nascent network of legal professionals across the country trying to tackle a problem: the vast majority of law schools don\u2019t equip graduates with the tools to understand the businesses for which they\u2019ll be working.<\/p>\n

So, in cooperation with Northwestern, the University of Colorado, Indiana University and Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Canada, IFLP organized its first boot camp this year.<\/p>\n

In mid-May, a total of 24 students from those four institutions converged on Northwestern for the basic-track boot camp. It entailed three weeks of intensive training in four modules: \u201cIntroduction to In-House Practice,\u201d \u201cBusiness Fundamentals,\u201d \u201cPractical Legal Skills,\u201d and \u201cTech Industry.\u201d After the boot camp, each student began working a 10-week paid internship. All of this earns them academic credit.<\/p>\n

\"Jayne

Jayne Reardon<\/p><\/div>\n

The prospect of law students getting legal-department training before leaving school thrills in-house attorneys in Missouri.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat sounds incredibly exciting,\u201d said Philip Kirkpatrick, the St. Louis-based regional general counsel of Rabobank North America, who oversees approximately 14 employees in a legal department of 35 members. As things stand, he said, he doesn\u2019t typically hire recent law-school graduates. He prefers to wait until graduates have three to five years of experience before he absorbs them into his shop \u2013 and even then, they need to adjust.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d be first to admit that my first day at a law firm, I didn\u2019t know what we were supposed to be doing,\u201d he said. \u201cThen you move in-house, and it\u2019s like \u2018This is completely different.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The boot camp\u2019s in-house training involves learning about efficiency metrics, key cost drivers and ways to control them, best practices in using outside counsel, leveraging tech to eliminate tasks entirely and calculating return-on-investment.<\/p>\n

\"In

In May, 24 law students completed the first boot camp launched by the Institute for the Future of Law Practice. The intensive program aims to equip students with necessary tools to succeed as inside attorneys. Photos courtesy of the Institute for the Future of Law Practice<\/p><\/div>\n

Dan Linna, another Northwestern law professor who ran the May boot camp, said one of the most unique parts of the training came in the group exercise. Clusters of students focused on a hypothetical scenario in which a company needed to reorganize its legal department to address needs in the areas of mergers-and-acquisitions, intellectual property, commercial contracts and litigation. The groups then presented their solutions the following day \u201cshark-tank-style\u201d to a six-person panel of real in-house professionals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey grilled them,\u201d Linna said. \u201cThey were tough but fair. That kind of interaction is missing in law school. I don\u2019t want to suggest that three-week boot camps give students everything they need to know. We\u2019ve just started to scratch the surface on remedying this problem. But IFLP should be part of the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

IFLP\u2019s executive team includes Katie DeBord, chief innovation officer at St. Louis-headquartered Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, and Jayne Reardon, executive director at the Illinois Supreme Court Commission. Other team members include global corporate legal officers from Archer Daniels Midland, Shell and Cisco Systems.<\/p>\n

\"Katie

Katie DeBord<\/p><\/div>\n

One of IFLP\u2019s founders, Prof. Bill Henderson of the University of Indiana, is hopeful that they can scale out the program by involving more law schools. He said the boot camp is revenue-neutral for the schools. Thanks to the program\u2019s sponsors, which include Cisco, the credit company Elevate and the national law firm Chapman and Cutler, students don\u2019t pay on top of their regular tuition to get the academic credit. In addition, students get an internship that\u2019s not just busywork.<\/p>\n

\"Beth

Beth Minogue<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very hard for the students to get paid employment that\u2019s educationally enriching,\u201d Henderson said, \u201cso our thought was, \u2018Now\u2019s a time we can teach them all these skills by in-house legal departments.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Beth Minogue, assistant general counsel for Post Holdings, Inc. in St. Louis, said this kind of training is a potential boon to both employer and employee.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the in-house world, frankly a lot of companies are not geared toward being able to train students right out of law school,\u201d said Minogue. \u201cThe more practical knowledge you can give law students, the better.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When University of Missouri Law School graduate Alyson Carrel first heard about a three-week legal \u201cboot camp\u201d to be held in Chicago in May, and its curriculum offering in-house training, she did not expect a big draw. \u201cWe weren\u2019t sure our students would be interested,\u201d said Carrel, now the assistant dean of Law and Technology …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5046,"featured_media":33,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27748,30829,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-summer-2018","category-top-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5046"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/molawyersmedia.com\/missouriinhouse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}