Contracts as a Gateway to Transactional Skills

Back in October, the New York Court of Appeals decided in principle that candidates for the bar must demonstrate that they have acquired legal skills (as opposed to just the legal knowledge traditionally tested on the bar exam). Our sister blog, Legal Skills Prof Blog, summarizes here some of the options being considered by the court’s task force on the all-important question of how to implement such a skills requirement. The activity in New York is, in many respects, a supersized or advanced version of curricular rule changes adopted by the ABA. 

This curricular movement is, I believe, an opportunity for those who teach Contracts. Skills taught in law school have traditionally had a substantial bent towards litigation, a bent that is unsurprising in a curriculum dominated by the case method. Even inroads by our friends in alternative dispute resolution still deal with skills applied after a dispute has arisen between parties.  When we teach Contracts principally through appellate opinions, we follow the same after-the-fact approach toward doctrine. It doesn’t have to be that way. The subject of Contracts is inherently a matter of transactional importance that should be our students’ gateway to transactional thinking. By transactional, I mean an emphasis on “before the fact” lawyering where the goal is to prevent a dispute from occurring in the first place. In an era of greater focus on the acquisition of legal-practice skills, Contracts is the place where we have the possibility early on to ensure to skills include a focus on dispute prevention, not just dispute cure.

Transactional thinking is not inherently built-in to the case method and thus likely requires the introduction of skills exercises alongside traditional pedagogical approaches. More resources than ever are available now to enable us to make Contracts a gateway to transactional thinking, fortunately. Implementing such a shift still requires substantial work, however, but the change is one that is in our students’ best interests if we can do it well.