Let’s (Virtually) Talk It Out

They are the four words every law student yearns to hear (but wonders if they ever will): Stop studying, start practicing.

For 1L and 2L students at the UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law, this glorious invitation comes about halfway through each fall semester when they’re encouraged to participate in the school’s annual Client Counseling Competition. More than just an opportunity to temporarily close stacks of law books, the weekend-long event gives budding lawyers an opportunity to practice the critical interpersonal skill of evaluating a client’s legal circumstance and determining their needs, all within a competitive environment in which volunteer judges from Southern Nevada’s legal community evaluate performances and offer real-time feedback.

A joint venture between the Boyd Law School’s Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution and Boyd’s Society of Advocates, this year’s Client Counseling Competition took place October 16-17 and featured 36 competitors, 15 judges, 22 student volunteers and one very unique setting: Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was held virtually for the first time, with each two-person team counseling a mock client through a Zoom session that was also attended by a volunteer timekeeper and a scoring judge.

While the potential for technical hiccups was ever-present, the competition thankfully went off without a glitch. 

Using the same structure as the American Bar Association’s client counseling competition—including ABA-designed fact patterns—each two-person team at the beginning of each round was provided with a general topic based on a substantive area of law such as family or criminal law. The team then was introduced to a mock client (a fellow Boyd student) who had a hypothetical legal predicament; after the introduction, the two student attorneys interviewed and counseled the client on the best course of action.

After tallying scores following four rounds of competition, 1Ls Kate Groesbeck and RJ Lemus were crowned the winners—much to their surprise.

“When the competition started, I didn’t even realize there were 2Ls involved,” Groesbeck says. “Then on Day 2, we went up against a 2L team, and RJ and I both said to each other, ‘All right—we made it this far. That’s pretty cool.’ We both kind of accepted we were going to lose that [semifinal] round before it even started, just because [our opponents] were more seasoned. But somehow, we made it through.”

While preparation fueled their early success, the duo said employing the judges’ feedback was a big reason they kept advancing. “It was so great to get immediate feedback on something that we were emotionally connected to,” Lemus says. “What helped us was going out of our way to apply that feedback instantly to our very next interview.”

Although Lemus and Groesbeck acknowledge that the virtual aspect of the event presented some unique challenges—“It was difficult not being face to face with the ‘clients,’ especially in a situation where you’re being judged on your relations with other people,” Groesbeck says—the format actually worked to their benefit for one specific reason. “Pretty much every bit of law school we’ve done since we got to Boyd has been online,” Lemus says. “All of our meetings, our classes, our initial orientation—it’s all taken place over Zoom. So we kind of adapted what we had already learned about the [virtual] environment to this competition.”

Another blessing in disguise as it pertains to the pandemic-forced change to this year’s Client Counseling Competition: Lawyering in its many forms is increasingly moving toward a more virtual setting—everything from arbitrations and mediations to court hearings and even client counseling is happening more frequently online. In other words, Groesbeck, Lemus and the other 34 Boyd students who participated in the 2020 Client Counseling Competition gained an extra sliver of experience that figures to put them ahead of the game when they enter the job market.

“Prior to the event, one of our concerns was students would not be able to have the same kind of educational experience doing this virtually,” says 3L student Casey Rosenberg, who helped organize the competition through his role as a vice president of Boyd’s Society for Advocates. “But by pulling this off, we showed that having a legal competition online is not only viable, but it can provide [additional] benefits to an in-person competition. After all, not only are consultations becoming primarily virtual, but even court sessions are moving online as well. Staging this year’s competition virtually gave students a glimpse of what modern lawyering looks like.”

It also gave both Groesbeck and Lemus something else: affirmation that they not only chose the right career path but did so for the right reasons.

“The most important thing I gained from this—and I know it seems obvious—was experience talking to clients,” Groesbeck says. “We sit in classes every day and use all these fancy Latin phrases, but none of that matters when you’re talking to a client. They don’t care about important historical legal cases from 1862; they want you to know about their situation, and they want to know that you’re listening.”

Adds Lemus: “The idea of law often gets disconnected from the people we’re helping, especially as we’re sitting in class. We think about people as these abstract objects that only exist in the titles of cases. But this competition, even though it was just volunteers simulating clients in mock scenarios, helped remind me that my decision to go to law school was about helping people and not just about learning all the complexities of law.”