MEDIA CONTACT: Pat Vaughan Tremmel at (847) 491-4892 or at p-tremmel@northwestern.edu

January 22, 2002

First Time Conference for First-Year Law Students

CHICAGO --- Get ready with the LEGO pieces. One group will build a whatchamacallit; another will describe how it was built; and a third will replicate a whatchamacallit identical to the first -- without looking at the first. Now get set -- and go.

Designed to provide much more than fun, that exercise will be part of the "Lawyer as Problem Solver" conference, a first-time, all-day forum that is mandatory for first-year law students at Northwestern University School of Law.

The latest manifestation of the School of Law's determination to recruit and train students with excellent communication and problem-solving skills, the conference will take place Friday, Jan. 25, at the Westin Hotel, 909 N. Michigan Ave.

Students will move through two tracks of classes that stress communication, creativity and collaboration -- skills critical to success in the changing worlds of law and business.

They will step outside the traditional curriculum for a day to see the wider roles for lawyers in the professional world they will be entering. And the conference's two featured speakers will give students a glimpse of the real-world problems lawyers face -- and solve -- in vastly different professions.

At noon, Judge Ann Claire Williams, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, will talk about the lawyer as a problem solver; and at 4:30 p.m., Pamela B. Strobel, chief executive officer of Exelon Energy Delivery and chairman of ComEd, will offer perspectives on how corporate counsel need to work within their organizations to deal with both legal and business goals.

Track One of the curriculum will cover conflict management, team building, negotiation and creative problem solving. Track Two will cover interviewing, counseling, ethics and written communication skills.

"Northwestern starts off with an unparalleled interviewing program to recruit students who can think on their feet and collaborate with others, and this conference will exploit those abilities with lots of fun," said David E. Van Zandt, dean of the School of Law.

The conference is sponsored by Mayer Brown & Platt and Latham & Watkins, and its two tracks of classes will be led by a number of Northwestern University School of Law faculty and members of students affairs.

"The LEGO experiment is one of a number of exercises that will test the first years' creativity as they collaborate and negotiate with each other to solve problems," said Lynn Cohn, who will lead Track One. "All our activities stress that creativity is central to being a great lawyer."

The conference's main organizers are Cohn, director of the Program on Negotiation and Mediation; Theresa Cropper, assistant dean for student affairs; Judith Rosenbaum, Clifford Zimmerman and Cheryl Graves, clinical associate professors; and Cynthia Wilson, senior lecturer and public interest advisor in Career Strategy.

"Law school emphasizes analysis and persuasion -- critical skills, of course, for any lawyer," said Cohn. "The conference also will emphasize, as our law school does, listening and collaborating to solve problems in a number of contexts."

Among the exercises, for example, students will be asked to write a comic strip about a certain subject in order to understand how differently people process the same information; they will see how differently "buyers" and "sellers" negotiate over a candy bar; they will learn how they deal with unexpected confrontation; and they will discover their particular negotiating types.

The conference is the latest outgrowth of the School of Law's aggressive strategic plan to train students to compete in the increasingly complex and competitive worlds of law and business.

"Lawyers must possess excellent communication and teamwork skills in order to serve clients and work effectively in a range of contexts, such as government, private business and non-profits," said Dean Van Zandt.

Northwestern University School of Law's emphasis on communication, interpersonal skills and problem solving begins during the admissions process with a unique interviewing program and continues through the curriculum, in courses and programs such as Communication and Legal Reasoning, the International Team Projects, the Program on Negotiations and Mediation and a range of other courses and co-curricular activities.