Register for free to upload content and post comments

A user-driven online community and resource library for ethics teachers, scholars, and practitioners worldwide.

Development of the Standardized Client Assessment

Submitted by Clark Cunningham on Tue, 09-10-2013
Long title
Performance-Based Evaluation of Lawyer-Client Communication: The Development of the Standardized Client Assessment
Author(s)
Cunningham, Clark D.
Author(s)' contact information
www.ClarkCunningham.org
Year
2013
Country
United States
Abstract
From 2004 -2006 an international and interdisciplinary team undertook an ambitious project to change the way lawyer-client communication skills are taught and assessed. Medical education has been transformed by a new methodology for assessing competence in patient communication: the use of intensively-trained lay persons who present standardized patient scenarios to medical candidates and then assess the candidates’ performance. The Glasgow Graduate School of Law in Scotland was the site for a series of pilot projects testing whether a similar methodology using standardized clients would be more valid, reliable and cost-effective than the approach, widely used by many law schools, of having client roles played by students with assessment based on law teacher review of the interview videotape. The results strongly indicated that assessment by standardized clients was sufficiently valid and reliable to be used for a high-stakes examination in legal education. This methodology has since been adapted for use in England, the United States, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan.
Status
Published electronically only
Select the option that describes the rights you hold in the attached content
I hold complete rights to all intellectual property in the attached content and have the power to grant the license, if any, that I have chosen below.
Select a license for the attached content
"Copy": I give permission for other users to download the attached content and copy, distribute, and repost it on the web, as long as they credit the author(s) and the publication and provide relevant identifying citation information (volume, page numbers, year of publication, city of publication), do not change the work in any way, and do not use it commercially. ("Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives" Creative Commons license)
Teaching Topics
Lawyer Regulation