Academic Goals

I'm Interested
Request Information

The Corporate Counsel Externship Program is an academic program - i.e., a combination of a substantive course with field placements to ensure that the externships are consistent with the school's curricular needs and desired learning outcomes. Students must pass both the class and externship components in order to receive academic credit.

The program syllabus contains well‐developed academic goals, which we have refined as the program has progressed. Students meet weekly in a class where we discuss substantive and practical topics facing inside counsel. Students learn substantive law through classroom instruction as well as observing lawyers dealing with real legal issues and business problems in the context of corporate legal departments. Topics have included intellectual property, cybersecurity and data privacy, real estate, securities laws, and employment law. In‐house practitioners guest‐lecture in certain classes or serve on panel discussions with other attorneys. The personal insights and knowledge these individuals offer students can contribute a great deal to their learning and make the classes more practical.

Some of the classes focus on the unique aspects of working as a lawyer within a corporation. Topics often covered in such classes include the roles and history of in‐house counsel, how corporate legal departments are structured, client identification, working with outside counsel, conducting an internal investigation, corporate compliance and legal risk management. We also delve into ethical issues confronting corporate counsel.

Another academic goal is improving students’ professional skills, including legal analysis and reasoning, contract drafting, problem solving, communication, teamwork, negotiation, and fact finding. Students are supervised, trained and critiqued in the exercise of these skills by seasoned in-house practitioners. By virtue of working in a corporate legal department, students also develop more of an understanding of workplace issues such as time management, workplace culture, professionalism, and giving and receiving feedback.

This is a carousel with auto-rotating slides. Activate any of the buttons to disable rotation. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate, or jump to a slide using the slide dots.

Moreover, the program provides students with an in-depth and holistic understanding of the client and its expectations. Corporate placements give students the unique opportunity to observe the relationship between clients and their outside counsel. Students see first-hand the criteria corporations use in selecting and evaluating outside counsel as well as budgetary constraints placed on corporate legal departments. A better understanding of client needs make the students more effective legal advisors, whether they practice in firms or corporations.

Our academic goals for the program are communicated to the companies through a comprehensive field supervisor manual. The manual includes a syllabus for the classroom component so that the placements can see what their externs are learning in class each week. We also outline field supervisor expectations, provide a road map for their initial student meetings, and set out examples of the types of learning experiences students have had in the past at other companies. Feedback from field supervisors is critical. For this reason, we encourage informal feedback throughout the semester and provide instructions and forms in the manual for the mid‐term and final evaluations.

Attorneys at different placements are curious about what students are learning in the course component and want to see what externs at other placements are doing. For this reason, we incorporate social media into the program to "share" classroom topics, speakers and individual student learning experiences (#SMUCorpCounsel on Twitter and LinkedIn). We "tweet" classroom photos and topics each week and some students tweet photos from their placements (in compliance with social media policies and only with prior approval of their field supervisors). We also host an end-of-semester networking reception where attorneys can meet other companies' externs, law school faculty, and other in-house counsel.

It has been an absolute joy to look back at the last seven years and retrace our students' incredible learning experiences. In hindsight, it is clear that there are a whirlwind of synergies when nonprofit educational institutions work closely with for‐profit companies for the benefit of law students. If properly structured and supervised, experiential learning in a corporate legal department supplemented by classroom learning provides law students with an incredibly valuable educational experience.

For too long, legal education has been like a wagon following in the same ruts. SMU Dedman School of Law fortunately took a chance and charted a new course. Other law schools are developing similar programs and we are always willing to share information and ideas with our colleagues at other schools.