Experience-Based Teaching Methods in Legal Counseling

Lawyers spend more time in their offices, in person-to-person encounters counseling troubled individuals, than in any other single area. The alternative to this is litigation, an expensive, inefficient, disfunctional process. Lawyers are counselors, in the most Sartrean sense of the word; whether they intend to be or not. Legal educators like Harrop Freeman and Andrew S. Watson, and legal psychologists such as Robert S. Redmount, have pointed out the inevitability of legal counseling in practice, and the lack of adequate preparation we give our students for their lives as counselors.