Imagine you have just finished your first year of law school at the University of Cincinnati, and report for your summer assignment at the school’s Legal Access Clinic. Your first assignment is to defend a tenant who has received an eviction notice for nonpayment of rent, and possibly assert counterclaims.

Your challenge is to weave a year’s worth of 1L doctrinal knowledge — covering a vast sea of contract, tort, civil procedure, and evidentiary case law — into a coherent legal strategy. The familiar and comforting boundaries of the classroom, study group, and law library have given way to face-to-face contact with clients, peers, and court officers. You prepare to interview clients, draft pleadings, and argue in court.

This hypothetical highlights a central critique of the traditional 1L law school curriculum, which is typically comprised of self-contained doctrinal siloes: Contracts, Torts, Property, Civil Procedure, Criminal Law, and Constitutional Law. This gap between doctrinal mastery and applied lawyering is precisely what the University of Cincinnati College of Law aims to close with its newly revised first-year curriculum.

Curriculum reform has taken on heightened interest on two fronts. As law school applications surge, employers increasingly want more practice-ready graduates. Those same employers emphasize that real-world legal problems and practice rarely respect the tidy doctrinal boundaries of the traditional 1L model.

On a second front, prospects, current students, and faculty await the arrival of a revised NextGen UBE (Uniform Bar Exam). The development of a new exam has been driven by a desire to align legal education and practice readiness.  

Cincinnati Law Revising First-Year Curriculum

That’s the backstory behind a decision by a Cincinnati Law committee to approve a major revision of the school’s curriculum. First-year students will now take a required Client-Centered Legal Practice course and may select from several electives.

“We set out to answer a fundamental question,” said Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Kimberly D. Bailey. “How do we enable first-year law students to gain a more integrated understanding of how all of these different doctrinal classes fit together?”

As law school applications surge, employers increasingly emphasize graduates who can synthesize doctrine, communicate with clients, and exercise professional judgment from day one.

Client-Centered Legal Practice Course

Client-Centered Legal Practice will be a required spring-semester course that immerses 1Ls in extended simulations designed to integrate doctrine, skills, and professional identity. The required spring-semester course immerses 1Ls in extended simulations that integrate doctrine, skills, and professional identity.

Rachel Jay Smith, Professor of Practice at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, specializes in legal writing, advocacy, and legal ethics instruction.  She explains that the Client-Centered Legal Practice course, to be offered in the Spring semester, will challenge faculty and students alike to connect legal doctrine with real-world lawyering skills and to layer in core professional skills—all before sending a first-year student to their first clinic or internship.

In Client-Centered Legal Practice, first-year students apply the doctrine and skills they learned during their first semester to two extended, practice-based simulations. During the first half of the semester, students work through a tort and civil procedure problem. During the second half, they shift to a contract and transactional matter. 

“The course is intentionally structured to revisit familiar doctrine, but at a more practical level,” Smith says. “We will show students how legal analysis, research, and writing drive client-centered service. The course is not a second Legal Research and Writing course, but a practice-based bridge between doctrine, skills, and professional identity.”

For example, in the opening weeks, students receive a bare-bones referral involving a potential tort claim. Working in simulated law firms, they identify missing facts, draft clarifying questions, prepare for and conduct a client interview, and research the governing law. They then use that analysis to draft practice-ready work products, such as an engagement letter and a complaint, and then proceed to settlement negotiations. In the second half of the semester, students apply the same analytical and writing skills to a contract-based problem, with a focus on transactional decision-making, client counseling, and professional judgment.

Smith adds: “Across these simulations, students are not learning new doctrine for the first time. Instead, they are rediscovering what they already know and learning to apply it in the service of a client. By translating first-semester learning into realistic lawyering tasks, the course is designed to reengage students, rebuild confidence, and reconnect law school learning to their professional goals.”

Curriculum Reform and Bar Readiness

​​Dyann Margolis, Associate Dean for Academic Success & Bar Programs and Assistant Professor of Practice, connects the course to outcomes students care about: bar readiness, applied judgment, and confidence. 

“Before this change, a student could spend a semester studying all they need to know about contracts, but then move on without ever having to evaluate a physical contract. Legal analysis should eventually lead to synthesis. The new course will challenge students to evaluate the substance of a contract. We want to build on the foundational knowledge they have gained and demonstrate how they would apply it as a lawyer on behalf of a client. Those stages of synthesis and action can get overlooked in the deluge of doctrinal law in that first semester.”

Associate Dean Bailey provides additional context: “In real-world practice, litigation or transactional problems rarely involve only Torts or only Civil Procedure. Something like a basic slip-and-fall case can blend Torts, Civil Procedure, Evidence, and possibly Contracts.” 

Bailey adds, “Historically, students at every law school encountered these concepts in isolation. I can speak to my own experience and say that it initially led me to think that law is a series of disconnected rules rather than an integrated system. We want our students to have a firm understanding of law as an integrated and dynamic body of knowledge and for them to graduate with practice-ready skills and discernment.”

Aligning Curriculum Reform and UC Law Values

A Client-Centered Legal Practice course will enable first-year students to integrate legal analysis, research, writing, client interviewing and counseling, negotiation, and oral argument. Throughout the course, students will be expected to assume the role of a lawyer and apply legal skills within complex simulations that reflect the challenges of real-world practice.

Andrew Mamo, Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, teaches and develops courses in legal research and writing, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution. His academic and professional focus on practical legal skills education situates him in the middle of this curriculum reform process. 

“My goal is for students to understand not only how to think like a lawyer, but what it means to be a lawyer,” Mamo says. “This requires integrating their knowledge of the law with the skills that let them apply the law, and with the values that enable ethical legal practice. I’ll be reviewing student reflections on their experiences to assess how they integrate their knowledge, skills, and values into a coherent whole.”

Bailey and Margolis acknowledge that the committee’s perspective on the need to revise the first-year curriculum stems from the unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic across all levels of education. “Even as we seek to introduce distinctly lawyer-like tasks, we’re able to layer in other skills for them that are things that this generation, especially as a result of COVID and Zoom, have not had the opportunity to learn,” Bailey said.

A proposed exercise has students complete a research assignment—say, a slip-and-fall claim against a grocery store owner—that they will present orally. “Remote learning put some barriers between students and the experience of live presentation,” said Margolis. “The Client-Centered Legal Practice course will hone everyone’s ability to be concise, on point, and quick on their feet.”

The focus on professional and interpersonal skills also gives the course designers a chance to counter long-standing stereotypes about what it means to be a good candidate for law school, and eventually, an effective lawyer.

“One of the essential skills we want to cultivate is the ability to navigate and negotiate on behalf of clients,” said Margolis. “So many televised and fictional portrayals of attorneys present a highly aggressive, highly contrarian, winner-takes-all hero figure. In reality, lawyering often requires smart, patient advocacy and negotiation. Many negotiated legal solutions involve compromise. We want students to emerge with a more well-rounded sense of their own strengths and a clearer picture of how to serve clients.”

By reimagining the first year as a foundation for professional identity—not just doctrinal mastery—UC Law is positioning its graduates to enter clinics, internships, and practice with confidence, clarity, and purpose.