Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 2025
ISSN
1930-627X
Publisher
University of Virginia School of Law
Language
en-US
Abstract
Law schools are now required by the American Bar Association’s Standard 303(b)(3) to provide students with opportunities for professional identity formation throughout their legal education. It is critical that those opportunities be well-balanced and tied to the realities of practice. Yet until recently, we, as 1L lawyering skills professors at Boston University School of Law, only provided those opportunities in the litigation context. Further, our 1L lawyering skills curriculum was, since its inception, almost entirely steeped in litigation. This litigation focus matches neither the career trajectory nor the upper-level experiential opportunities of the majority of our students. In fact, transactional opportunities for second and third year law students have exploded in recent years, with meaningful clinic and externship programs abounding. Further, more of our law students will engage in transactional practice than in any other area. Thus, there was a mismatch that needed to be rectified.
During the 2023-24 academic year, we made a change to our curriculum to address this mismatch. We, along with all other professors in our department, added a six-week, comprehensive transactional simulation into the spring semester of our 1L lawyering skills curriculum. In so doing, we created an opening to add professional development formation opportunities, in the transactional context, to our curriculum. Due to the unique and complex role of transactional attorneys, most notably in-house counsel, it is critical for students entering practice in this area to have these learning opportunities.
As discussed in our prior scholarly work, we do not teach professional identity through long, amorphous discussions on the topic. Rather, we focus on teaching what we have coined as inward-facing and outward-facing character-based skills. Inward-facing character-based skills, which refer to the inner life and identity of a lawyer, include choice-making, boundary-setting, mindfulness, and more. Outward-facing character-based skills, which refer to the way in which lawyers interact with, and are perceived by, other stakeholders in the legal world, include active listening, empathy, and more. By introducing our students to these skills through assignments and exercises, allowing them to practice them within the context of assignments, and providing opportunities for reflection, we force students to “back into” professional identity formation in the transactional context in a structured, non-amorphous manner.
In Part I of this article, we discuss the definitions of professional identity and transactional lawyering to lay a foundation for the remainder of the piece. In Part II, we discuss the unique and complicated nature of transactional lawyering generally, and of the in-house counsel role specifically, and the consequential need for transactional lawyers to possess strong professional identities. We further elaborate on the specific inward- and outward-facing character-based skills needed in transactional practice. Finally, in Part III, we discuss specific examples of transactional attorneys who have faced professional identity crises, the fallout from those crises, and how we already use, or plan to use, those examples in the exercises we created to teach character-based skills in a way that spurs professional identity formation in the transactional context. Through this article, we hope to inspire our colleagues within the lawyering skills universe to expand professional identity formation instruction to the transactional context to best serve students as they march toward practice.
Recommended Citation
Marni Goldstein Caputo & Kathleen Luz,
Boundary-Setting and Choice-Making with No "Adult" in the Room: Professional Identity Formation Opportunities for 1Ls in the Transactional Context
,
19
Virginia Law & Business Review
311
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4127
