Back to the Future: The Transplant of Medical Simulation Heuristics in the Discipline of Law

Abstract

Medical and healthcare education can provide valuable heuristics for legal education. In a number of global initiatives standardized or simulated patients have become standardized clients (SCs) in students’ learning of, inter alia, communication and client-centred skills. SCs are people lay to the discipline but trained to simulate real clients and assess communicative competence of students with standardized rubrics. Since its adoption by the Department of Professional Legal Education of the Faculty of Law at HKU in 2013, more than 2,300 interviews involving over 1,400 students have been conducted and assessed with a pool of about 40 SCs. While the majority of the SC interviews are done in English, some are conducted in Cantonese, the daily spoken dialect in Hong Kong. Since February 2013, data have been collected from the training sessions provided to the SCs, from students’ performance at SC interviews and their evaluation of SC interviews. Quantitative analysis was carried out to assess the reliability and effectiveness of SCs as a learning and assessment method in legal education in Hong Kong. Our findings revealed that: 1. The methodology can be transplanted to another jurisdiction. 2. Assessment of students’ communicative competence is reliable and valid. 3. Interviews offer students a valuable learning experience. 4. Interviews enhance students’ communication and interviewing skills. 5. Cultural particularities such as gender and first language may influence the performance and learning experience of students in SC interviews. All three law schools in Hong Kong now conduct their lawyer-client communication training and assessments with SCs to various extents. Our research and findings offer useful insights to medical educators on how heuristics originating in medical education may be transplanted into other disciplines; and offer medical education interesting perspectives on the development of their own methods.