Resilience and Positive Motivation: Insights from Law Clinic Students

1. Resilience and positive motivation: The experience of law clinic students working with real clients Nigel Duncan Professor of Legal Education

2. Bar Professional Training CourseIntensive one-year Master’s level Programme Students study: • Advocacy •Professional Ethics • Examination in chief •Civil Litigation • Cross-examination • Criminal Litigation and • Submissions to the court Sentencing • Opinion writing • Alternative Dispute • Drafting Resolution • Conference Skills • Two Options

3. Clinical Options on the Bar Professional Training Course • Students study two Options on the BPTC. • CLS offers three clinical options: • Free Representation Unit: Employment; • Free Representation Unit: Social Security; • National Centre for Domestic Violence: Domestic Violence. • Developed collaboration with these charitable, client-focussed organisations. • http://www.thefru.org.uk/ • http://www.ncdv.org.uk/

4. Research over two years to explore student experience • 2015-16: • Pre- and post-experience survey • Pre- and post-experience focus groups • Addressed several issues including student anxiety • Issues with client emotions arose. • 2016-17: • More focussed research into emotional labour, empathy and resilience • Survey once students have started working with clients. • Focus group at end of option.

5. How effectively do you believe you responded to clients' emotional difficulties? 2016-17 Neither well nor badly 25%

6. What emotional skills did you need to respond effectively to those clients? • Empathy, sympathy, ability to keep calm and reassure. (SS F) • Reality-checking. Calm confidence.(EmpF) • When she started expressing her sad feelings and broke into tears, I thought the best thing at that point was to let her vent her feelings and to be a listener for a while. Whilst it was slowing down progress at the conference, it would be unwise to attempt to push her through it and make her uncomfortable. I tried to listen and understand her situation. I thought that showing my support was the best thing to do and I did just that. I only resumed with my questions when she was ready again. (EmpM)

7. Empathy and Resilience? • I think I dealt with my own emotional needs well and the module showed I had thick skin to a certain extent, when my clients became distressed and cried during the tribunal or conference, which happened 50% of the time, I remain composed and got the job done. (SS 2016) • I learned about active listening and also the need to separate oneself from the their clients and their stories - and resist the urge of being dragged in. (Emp F 2016) • Maintaining professionalism and not to be affected by client's personal life. (SS F 2016) • Some form of empathy yet remain neutral enough and encourage them to tell their stories. (DV F 2016)

8. Resilience and Empathy (2017 Focus group) • Discussion of personal attitudes and impact on how they affect interactions with client – flipping from sympathy to irritation – SS1. • Empathy does not involve accepting client’s perspective, but understanding it – DV1. • How can I, a man in my 20s put myself in the position of a middle-aged woman who has had her leg blown off in the conflict in Somalia in the 1990s? – SS2 • Impact of being exhausted – on usefulness of interactions but not on how come over to client SS1. • Empathy with detachment helps client to express the detail needed and to move on to what is most in their interest. DV1

9. What does ‘Resilience’ mean? A thicker skin? • ‘In some ways probably yes because I think that probably the tougher you are the better your work gets because you’re more focused on the actual substance over not the emotional side of it but personally I think there is a danger that what you developed was an immunity and … you just stopped thinking about the emotional effect …’ • ‘You don’t want someone on the phone getting “Oh my god that’s awful”. • ‘Yes, because that would not be helpful.’

10. What does ‘Resilience’ mean? A thicker skin? • ‘Resilience is being able to take those things on but not let them affect you. Being able to just not necessarily have at thick skin, but just take them on the go, “Okay, that is what it is” and then deal with it rather than just keeping it all totally at a distance.’ (SS1)

11. How can resilience be developed? • ‘But I don’t think it’s going to help for people to tell you to be more resilient because I think it’s -- I don’t think that can never help anyone, you know. If I was told that the start of this, you need to be more resilient, I mean that’s not really possible. …having someone tell you toughen up and be stronger, it's not really going to -- it’s such a horrid thing to tell someone. I would hate it.’ • ‘I think experience was what really helps you with this.’ • ‘I think what helped that [supervisor] told us practical steps to take rather than tell us to be tough and to be resilient because those things would not have helped us. But taking these practical steps was telling us how to do it.’

12. Experience • Vicarious experience: • after a judge who has just imposed a long sentence says, as they leave the court, ‘So what are your plans tonight?’ • ‘The experience has certainly made me more resilient as to how it would deal with certain situations if I had the opportunity again but I think from my point of view I guess that will always be counter-balancing against my personality.’ • ‘I agree because I think that once you have experienced it the first time, you get more resilient as time goes by …’ (tells story of two professionals responding quite differently to a really disgusting offence).

13. ‘And that could only in my opinion come from having been in a situation where you get the process, you’re going through the process, you do the solution and you follow that again and again and over time and experience you almost know what to expect which takes away some of the surprise and I think because of that maybe that generates into a sort of shield.’ • This discussion was in the context of a number of ’horror stories’ abut thing they have observed or participated in during their studies, mini-pupillages or marshalling. • See David Webster (2017) and Richard Moorhead et al (2015)

14. Self-determination theory • ‘all human beings require regular experiences of autonomy, competence and relatedness to thrive and maximise their personal motivation.’ (Sheldon & Krieger 2007, 885) • In the focus group we asked students their views on these three requirements.

15. Students’ views • DV1 – relatedness most important. Competence necessary and feeds into that. • DV2 – I’d go competence, autonomy, relatedness. (hated teamwork) • SS2 – It’s pretty solid. The one thing I would add is working on material that I find engaging or important (then challenges the idea of unfettered autonomy). • SS1 - It sounds like these three things are a good structure to hang the other things on. So autonomy needs to be balanced with a meaningful relatedness. You can’t just be autonomous on your own. Yeah, that they should be a sort of balance of those and then the other things that you were saying and I think like empathy also would feed into those things and also would be influenced by those things.

16. Students’ views • SS2 - These are bit motherhood and apple pie though. Of course these are important -- but …2 might be structure, 2 might be intellectual fulfillment, or 2 might be remuneration, whether that’s monetary or psychological or status in society and I think having lots of conversations about careers recently. I think people are different in terms of what they look for these three might be particularly common but there are the factors that people are looking to. • Emp 1 - All three points that we talk about here for me are completely interlinked. I can see relationships and competence linking quite well. I’ve always been drawn to the serendipity of the Bar - you will be able to find an area of law that you choose. [links relatedness and trust].

17. Resources • Nigel Duncan: ‘Addressing emotions in preparing ethical lawyers’, in Paul Maharg & Caroline Maughan: Affect and Legal Education, 2011, Farnham: Ashgate. • Lloyd Harris: ‘The Emotional Labour of Barristers: An Exploration of Emotional Labour by Status Professionals’, 2002, 39 Journal of Management Studies 553-584. • Colin James: ‘Lawyers’ Wellbeing and Professional Legal Education’ 2008, 42(1) Law Teacher,85 • Richard Moorhead et al: ‘The Ethical Capacities of New Advocates’ UCL Centre for Ethics and Law, https://www.icca.ac.uk/images/download/ethics/moorhead-et-al-2015-ethical-capacities-of-new-advocates-final-report.pdf • Kennon Sheldon & Lawrence Krieger, Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: a Longitudinal test of self-determination theory, 2007, 6 Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 883-897 • Caroline Strevens & Rachel Fielding, Law student wellbeing in the UK: a call for curriculum intervention, http://law-school.open.ac.uk/sites/law-school.open.ac.uk/files/files/Law%20student%20wellbeing%20in%20the%20UK.pdf • David Webster:https://davewebster.org/2017/05/14/a-contrary-view-critiquing-discourses-of-resilience-in-education/ • Chalen Westaby: A qualitative study of the impact of law clinics on students’ perceptions of emotional labour situations, 2014, 48(3) Law Teacher, 248

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