The use of simulated clients in legal education derives from medical education’s simulated patients (SPs), where lay people (ie persons not medically trained) are trained to do three things well: to simulate specific medical conditions, to assess the patient-facing skills of communication and physical examination, and to give feedback on those skills to learners. SPs can be used for formative assessment or summative, high-stakes assessment. They can also be used in what are called OSCEs, Objective Structured Clinical Examinations, alongside assessments of knowledge, skills and values.

There have been a number of speculations about and experiments on the translation of SPs into legal education as simulated clients (SCs). Larry Grosberg of New York Law School has written about his experiments here; and Noel Semple drew my attention to the pioneering work of Julie Macfarlane who, as Noel describes it, 'led a problem-based learning activity at the Law Society of Upper Canada many years ago.  This was part of the licensing process at the time, and I believe it involved simulated clients'

It wasn’t until the correlative study of  Barton et al (2006) that the performances of SCs were analysed. This study proved, inter alia, that SCs could be as proficient as tutors in assessing the client-facing skills of novice lawyers. Since then, a number of us have set up the SCI, the Simulated Client Initiative. At a time when legal educators in the UK are facing new regulatory initiatives such as the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE), and where in almost all Common Law jurisdictions the pressures of regulatory reform increase on legal educators, the work of the SCI gives us new perspectives on how we might improve some of our legal educational practices.

The power of the heuristic, which is both quite simple and quite revolutionary, goes further than the development of skills, however. What happens in both the training of SCs and in the encounter between SCs and novice lawyers is a process by which SCs become co-producers, co-designers of learning, because the experience of the client is foregrounded in the encounter. In the process, the role of academics is transformed. Indeed the method challenges many aspects of our current practices and attitudes in legal education, including the following:

1. Curriculum structures: the method leads us to re-design our conventional curriculum interventions.
2. Ethics of the client encounter
3. The cognitive poverty of much of conventional law school assessment
4. Law school as a self-regarding, monolithic construct
5. Law school categories of employment
6. The curricular isolation of clinic within law schools
7. Hollowed-out skills rhetoric
8. Conventional forms of regulation by regulatory bodies
9. The role of regulator, less as monitor/accreditor and more as encourager of innovation & reform.
10. Disciplinary boundaries – SCs and educators can learn much from other interdisciplinary practices
11. SCs reflect local jurisdictional practices – how might such a project work, globally?

To date, SC pilots and programmes have involved the following institutions:

There have been two international workshops.  The first one was held in June 2017 at Gray's Inns, London.  The day's events were liveblogged, starting here, and the day was keynoted by Roger Kneebone, Professor of Surgical Education and Engagement Science, Dept of Surgery & Cancer, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College.  The second was held in August 2017 at The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, and hosted by the Professional Education and Research in Law (PEARL) Centre in the College of Law.    Liveblog here. The event was keynoted by Debra Nestel, Professor of Simulation Education in Healthcare, Monash University, and Professor of Surgical Education, Department of Surgery, University of Melbourne, Australia.

This third workshop is hosted by Osgoode Professional Development, part of Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada.  Lorena Dobbie (Recruitment & Training Specialist) and Delon Pereira (Associate Director), of the University of Toronto's Standardized Patient Program, are giving the keynote.  The event will give you the opportunity to hear from experienced medical educators who have worked in the field of simulation. You will hear in detail the work of the Simulated Client Initiative (SCI), its global setting, and examples of SCs in use in a range of programmes. You will learn how to set up a SC project in your institution, how SCs interact with students, novice lawyers and can be used for lawyers’ continuous professional development, and how they can be used to develop a range of legal skills and for assessment. You’ll learn how to use video, f2f and onlline, to engage students in learning. You’ll learn how to sustain a community of SCs in your law school, how to create a research agenda around the heuristic, and much else.  And best of all, you'll have the opportunity to talk with faculty who have set up SC projects and describe them in their presentations; and with SCs themselves.  Their experiences are so valuable in the success of the method.  There are many resources set out at the 'Workshop resources' tab above - please do use them.

We look forward to seeing you on the day!

Paul Maharg
Angela Yenssen