Page 27 - Delaware Lawyer - Summer 2022

Wisconsin, where members of the bar and bench have for generations insisted that the lawyers admitted to Wisconsin under the diploma privilege are every bit as competent and ethically prin- cipled as lawyers admitted through the bar exam.30
The Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law combined the “how to build a bet- ter starting lawyer” insights of studies such as the MacCrate Report and the Carnegie Foundation Report, with the diploma privilege model that had long existed in Wisconsin.
The Daniel Webster Scholar program created an alternative law school cur- riculum for the second and third years of law school that was practice-oriented. After successful completion of the pro- gram, a student who matriculated as a Daniel Webster Scholar was granted admission to the New Hampshire Bar under a diploma privilege, without hav- ing to take or pass the New Hampshire Bar exam.
The program was a bold and innova- tive “how to build a better mousetrap”
approach to “how to better prepare a novice lawyer.” It was grounded in the suppositions of studies such as the Mac- Crate Report and the Carnegie Foun- dation study that the three years of law school should be spent transitioning students from abstract doctrinal and theoretical classroom instruction on how to “think like a lawyer” to more real-world exposure to “how to be a lawyer.” The program emphasized legal analysis and reasoning; legal research; factual investigation; communication; counseling; negotiation; litigation and alternative dispute resolution; organi- zation and management of legal work; recognition and resolution of ethical di- lemmas; providing competent represen- tation; striving to promote justice, fair- ness and morality; striving to improve the profession; and engaging in profes- sional self-development.31
Yet a legitimate question remained. Was the Daniel Webster Scholars pro- gram actually accomplishing what it promised to do? Were the graduates of the program as prepared for and com- petent to practice law, ethically and pro- fessionally, as those who had passed the
traditional bar exam?
In an enormously consequential
study conducted by scholars Alli Gerk- man, Elana Harman, Lloyd Bond and William M. Sullivan, the answer, backed by rigorous empirical data, is a resound- ing “Yes.”32
The study was exhaustive in its meth- odology and analysis. The key investi- gative technique was an evaluation of objectively graded “standardized client interviews,” measuring the core com- petencies of Daniel Webster Scholar graduates against identical exercises by non-Daniel Webster Scholar graduates who had been admitted to practice in New Hampshire during the same pe- riods through the traditional bar exam method.33 One hundred and ninety- two total standardized client interviews were included in this study, 69 by Dan- iel Webster Scholar and 123 by non- Daniel Webster Scholar lawyers.
The empirical results were striking.34 Overall, Daniel Webster Scholars’ per- formance rated an average of 3.76 out of 5, compared to non-Daniel Webster Scholar lawyers, whose overall perfor- mance was rated an average of 3.11, a
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