I welcome the invitation to share my experience and ideas on teaching law students about the real world of real estate from a transactional perspective, beyond the appellate cases that are the basis of so much traditional legal education. I am a founding mother of this Association of American Law Schools (“AALS”) section on Real Estate Transactions. I have been delighted to see the section’s broad focus on the field of real estate law and practice, now extended to teaching by Professor Tanya Marsh and her team of committee members. Professors Daniel Bogart, R. Wilson Freyermuth, Tanya Marsh, and Greg Stein are all well-known scholars and teachers. I will join them in sharing my suggestions about providing our students the best learning experiences possible, which includes the use of successful experienced practitioners as adjuncts to keep the “real” in real estate education.
Adjunct professors are critical to meeting the goal of preparing our students for practice. No full-time real estate professor is familiar with all aspects of real estate law and practice, or at least not for very long after they left practice to become professors—where the criteria for advancement is much different. Adjuncts are the ones doing the deals and responding to the trends that are not immediately reflected in the text books used in class. Adjuncts are a resource that too often is ignored. In his recent article, adjunct Professor Jay Gary Finkelstein discusses the continuing obstacles to bringing practitioners into the law school classroom.
The significance of the transactional perspective in lawyering has been ignored for too long. Even though legal education emphasizes litigation and dispute resolution, studies indicate that over fifty percent of lawyers “practice some aspect of transactional law.”
Luckily, I have missed some of the emotion that Professor Finkelstein mentions about what I will call the “transactional lawyer grudge.” Because I practiced for eight years before coming into teaching full time, I was comfortable interacting with adjuncts. The law school dean who rejected my application to be a new professor because I had “been practicing too long” now seems completely out of step, but Professor Finkelstein is correct that most academics are not comfortable with practitioners because they have never practiced law nor been involved in bar association activities.
I am comfortable with the collaboration. Bar groups like the Chicago Bar Association and Chicago Mortgage Attorneys Association in Chicago, the American Bar Association (“ABA”) Real Property, Probate & Trust Law Section, and especially the American College of Real Estate Law recognize professors as an integral part of their membership. They rely on us for analysis of new law, for informing members of new publications, and even provide some with opportunities to be guests in a class, coteach a course, or even teach as adjunct. I think that this collaboration is important to meet the goal of preparing our students for practice. We full-time professors learn a lot from practitioners about the “real world” of real estate as it has evolved over the years, while the practitioners rely on us to keep them up to date on the best practices in teaching. This is not surprising since collaboration is one of the skills that all lawyers need. Identifying “collaboration” as a skill to teach now may seem obvious, but even twenty years ago “skills” meant the ability to write a memorandum of law or an appellate brief. Drafting documents came later with the development of best practices in legal education by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.
In the twenty years since the Center for Real Estate Law (the “Center”) was created at the John Marshall Law School, I have served as its director. This has provided me with the privilege of working with the original advisory board that included experienced real estate practitioners who populate Chicago’s best real estate firms—from the big firms like Bell Boyd & Lloyd, Arnstein & Lehr, Piper Rudnick, and Schiff Hardin to the boutique firms like Gould & Ratner. After all, Chicago was and still is one of the top “real estate cities” in the country. Nationally recognized real estate lawyers like Virginia Harding, Tom Homburger, Janet Johnson, and Ray Werner helped me to develop the curriculum that would prepare a student for a practice in commercial real estate. Additionally, the advisory board identified the experienced practitioners who became our adjunct faculty. These practitioners knew the specialties of their colleagues with whom they had transacted, and they had some good sense about who would make a great teacher too.
At least in dealing with the hiring of part-time faculty, much of Daniel Bogart’s experience as academic dean parallels my work as director of the Center. The Center has a post-JD LLM degree for attorneys and a joint JD/LLM for JD students who come to law school knowing that they want to dive right into commercial practice or work in the commercial real estate business. The Center works to help JD students realize that they have the ability to take courses offered at only a few other law schools. I had a rare amount of autonomy to develop the Center from deans who had a hands off approach.
