Students at Northumbria Law School are benefiting from an enhanced learning experience with the use of a new assessment tool, standardised clients.
The method uses members of the public who are trained to act as clients in order to simulate real legal situations. Students can experience a range of challenges that will face them in their careers, including the emotions they are likely to encounter from, for example, the victims of crime or a miscarriage of justice.
Initially developed in Glasgow Graduate School of Law, Northumbria became the first Law School in England to adopt the standardised client method. What makes this method of simulation innovative and interesting is that standardised clients are also trained to assess students’ client-facing skills. Used with approximately 400 students each year, the assessment covers core communication skills required by solicitors in practice and also allows students the possibility of exploring legal, ethical and professional conduct issues in a simulated environment.
Standardised Client, Joan Miller, said: “Being a standardised client for students means learning a real life law case situation and presenting it in a particular way, so that the students can practice eliciting the important information necessary for them, then feeding back to them in a positive manner how it felt for me from a communication and client perspective. The students seem to value this safe environment in which they can practice then use the feedback to evaluate and change their own practise.”
Studying law at Northumbria University is distinctive, with a focus on clinical activities and developing practical skills to produce students with greater employability prospects after graduation.
It is also important to set a benchmark for these skills at the outset of a lawyer’s career as there is no evidence that these skills independently improve over the course of a lawyer’s career. Therefore, it is imperative that students are provided with the right training at the right time, giving their career the edge.
The assessment is particularly important for second and third year students who require experience in simulated situations to prepare them for their time in the Student Law Office which is a clinic dealing with real clients. The success of the Student Law Office has been unprecedented - since 2008 it has managed over 3,000 enquiries, represented more than 1,000 clients and secured nearly £1 million in compensation on their behalf.
Second year students now have a one-off standardised client interview and third year students have two, an initial formative assessment followed by a final summative assessment. The latter assessment forms part of their module mark. Assessments by standardised clients have become increasingly important to allow students to evaluate and adjust their performance.
Students such as Monika Fortuna are seeing the benefits of this technique when transferring their skills to graduate jobs. She said: “The standardised client programme during my studies has helped me with the transition from the academic part of my study to practical legal work. It gradually prepared me for the face-to-face interaction with clients and allowed me to evaluate and adjust my interviewing skills. I think the standardised client programme is a very useful learning tool, which let me experience client interviews before I started work for real clients in the Student Law Office and then in a legal practice.”
The concept originated in medical schools in America and then in the UK to enhance trainee doctor communication skills. The successful adaptation of the technique for law students demonstrates the viability of using the method in this and other disciplines. Also, if it is the case that lawyers do not necessarily continue to develop their communication skills during the course of their career then this method could also have value or benefit for practitioners at the CPD level.
